The Stendhal Syndrome

In this 1996 Italian psychological thriller, Dario Argento casts his daughter Asia Argento as Anna Manni, a police detective hunting Alfredo Grossi, a sadistic serial killer who rapes his victims before murdering them. What Anna does not yet know is that she suffers from Stendhal syndrome, a condition that triggers dizziness and hallucinations in the presence of great art. While visiting Florence's Uffizi Gallery, she is overwhelmed by a painting and falls into the killer's trap, enduring a brutal captivity at his hands. She survives, but the ordeal sets off a disturbing psychological transformation in which the line between hunter and prey steadily dissolves. Argento drew the premise from psychiatrist Graziella Magherini's book about the syndrome and from a childhood trance he himself experienced at the Parthenon in Athens. Featuring an Ennio Morricone score and co-starring Thomas Kretschmann and Marco Leonardi, the film was a critical and commercial success in Italy and is often cited as the first Italian production to employ computer-generated imagery.