Trauma

Aura Petrescu, a young Romanian immigrant living in New York, escapes from the psychiatric clinic where her parents placed her for treatment of anorexia nervosa. Out on her own, she meets David Parsons, a recovering drug addict who takes an interest in her welfare. Aura is caught and returned to her family, but on the night of their reunion her parents are brutally killed by a murderer who removes his victims' heads with a mechanical device. Other killings follow around Minneapolis, and Aura and David begin looking into a possible link between the dead, a connection that appears to stretch back to events some years earlier while drawing the attention of the killer. The cast includes Asia Argento, Christopher Rydell, Frederic Forrest, Laura Johnson, Dominique Serrand and James Russo.

Dario Argento directed and produced the film, his eleventh of seventeen features, arriving between Two Evil Eyes in 1990 and The Stendhal Syndrome in 1996. He wrote the screenplay with T.E.D. Klein. Made for a budget of seven million dollars, the Italian-American horror mystery earned a 5.8 rating on IMDb from around 8,800 votes and a matching 5.8 on TMDB from roughly 246 votes, while a critics' rating of 5.7 from six reviews places professional response in line with that broader audience reception.