Plot
Detective Anna Manni (Argento) travels to Florence on the trail of a serial killer Alfredo (Thomas Kretschmann). While at a museum, Anna is struck by the Stendhal syndrome, which causes people to become overwhelmed by great works of art. Alfredo uses this disorder against Anna, kidnapping and raping her. She escapes, but is deeply traumatized. Alfredo tracks her movements and is able to capture her again. This time, Anna manages to break free, badly wounding her captor, and knocking him into a river. While the search for the body is underway, Anna meets and falls in love with Marie, a young French art student. Anna also takes sessions with a psychologist to try and overcome her trauma. Anna begins to receive phone calls from Alfredo. Marie is found dead, and her psychologist visits her at home. Her police friend Mario calls to notify her that Alfredo's body has been found. This leads to the psychologist confronting Anna with the reality that she is Marie's murderer. Mario travels to Anna's apartment, only to find the dead psychologist's body. He attempts to take Anna's gun, but she kills him after confessing that Alfredo is now inside her and ordering her to do terrible things. The police arrive on the scene and arrest her.
Read more about this topic: The Stendhal Syndrome
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)