Taking as its starting point archival footage from anthropologist Ernesto de Martino's research into Tarantism in Southern Italy, The Oyster Effect unfolds as a fragmented journey through women's subjectivity, psychological distress and cultural memory.The film juxtaposes accounts associated with Anna O., whose experience of hysteria was documented by physician Josef Breuer in nineteenth-century Vienna, with testimonies and images of Tarantism in rural Salento. In one context, women's suffering is interpreted through the medical and psychiatric language of Central Europe; in the other, it finds expression through ritual, music and ecstatic dance.

Moving between religious architecture, institutional interiors, landscapes and archival imagery, the film examines how cultural and social environments shape the ways distress is experienced and understood. Rather than establishing a direct equivalence between these histories, The Oyster Effect deliberately disrupts their parallels. Images and voices intersect, contradict and displace one another, creating an unstable narrative in which the boundaries between illness, ritual, repression and resistance remain unresolved.
The film combines archival documentary footage, historical texts, voiceovers and sound collage. Excerpts from de Martino's research are interwoven with German-language narration connected to Anna O.'s account, alongside fragments of architectural and landscape imagery. Through non-linear editing and the deliberate disjunction between image and sound, the work challenges conventional documentary narration and historical continuity.