Search: Starring Asia Argento

Michele Civetta's début has all the elements of the Gothic in their proper places, with a hint of giallo, but there is simply no narrative glue to hold them together.

This is a mess. An ambitious mess...but mess nonetheless.

The colour saturation in these images is simply delicious. Gorgeous costume work by Guido Bongiorno makes the most of it, and Rome itself seems to have set out to please.

That sense of human frailty – in mind as well as body – which haunts much of European colonial literature is strongly in evidence here.

Appallingly developed characters and situations decay and rot onscreen.

A mood piece sustained by a kind of strange, desperate beauty.

Quirky directorial touches – such as Vellini’s blowing of smoke rings, or a dimming of sound at key moments - put the audience into the head of the protagonist and help us connect us fully with the characters.

The production's lavish attention to detail in its recreation of the poverty and luxury of the time shows up crisply on this DVD, which is a visual feast.

Never comes close to matching the stunning colour-saturated aesthetic of its two predecessors.

Not since Eisenstein's imaginative expressionism has a film ravaged tradition and brought the past into focus with such devastating energy.

The landscape plays a major role in this movie, with its bleak, open spaces, adding to the feeling that the characters and their emotions are curiously incidental.

Too American to really succeed as a giallo, yet too European and personal to work as an American slasher in the Friday the 13th mould, Trauma is neither one thing nor the other.

Forget the story, stunts have usurped spontaneity.