The Stendhal Syndrome, Argento's first movie to be filmed in Italy after his brief foray to the United States, has a compelling premise based on a real-life ailment. Stendhal Syndrome causes a person in the presence of great beauty (particularly artworks) to temporarily lose their senses and become dizzy, experience increase heartbeat and even faint. The main protagonist of Argento's film, Anna (played by his long-suffering daughter Asia), is afflicted with this condition and it is taken advantage of by a killer that she is on the trail of in Florence. He kidnaps and rapes her, in scenes that must have been especially hard for the father/daughter combo to work through. It is a sadistic film, but there are plenty of inventive and genuinely impressive moments to be found, like the sequence where Anna enters one of the paintings she is overcome by (just try to ignore the ropey CGI) or one of the pre-Matrix instance of slow-motion 'bullet time'. It was a modest hit with critics and Argento fans and did good box-office business in Italy. A sequel was planned for 2004 but, with Asia unable to commit, he re-cast her role and it morphed into The Card Player.