You will be tripped, you will be skeptical and you will be feeling either disappointed or as if you’ve stumbled on an epiphany. Based on the book of the same name by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River) Shutter Island takes you to, lo and behold, Shutter Island, an island situated near Massachusetts that is home to the criminally insane.
Can you imagine a better setup for a horror/suspense movie? An isolated island. A Civil War fortress converted into an asylum. An impending hurricane. What more could you ask for? Leatherface or Michael Meyers couldn’t ask for a better or more cliché setup. Luckily, Martin Scorsese knows how to take the clichés and turn it into something much classier than your average slasher film. Not that it is a slash film, but it could easily been in someone else’s less capable hands.
The film begins in 1954 with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels, unleashing his seasickness in a ferry’s bathroom. He and his new partner Chuck Aule, played by Mark Ruffalo, are on their way to Shutter Island to investigate a missing patient who was able to escape a room with bared windows and a door that locks from the outside. Everybody on the island radiates unease and general creepiness. Workers stare and army officers intimidate and glare while Daniels tries to solve a seemingly improbable escape act.
Although set at the asylum, the craziest scenes you’ll experience will be from Daniel’s own head. He’s haunted by the death of his wife and appears to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from his time served during World War II. His dreams are filmed beautifully and vivid in a way that it seems to step out from the pages of a Stephen King novel.DiCaprio does an excellent job showing just how close Daniel is to breaking down. The whole time, DiCaprio plays off the character as someone who’s constantly fighting to keep himself from breaking apart. Ben Kingsley, who plays the hospital’s chief psychiatrist, as Dr. John Cawley is cool and collected and may be the only character whose composure never breaks. Ruffalo does a good job as the partner, but is honestly not the most memorable character in the film–that honor goes to DiCaprio.
Scorsese takes a different approach to filming Shutter Island–it’s noticeably different from his usual crime films like The Departed and Goodfellas. The movie feels eerie and you expect something to ruin the silence with the usual horror-movie-bang approach, but it rarely does. Scorsese enhances the film’s twist ending and hikes up the confusion with unusual camera movements and continuity tricks. He has made (arguably) films heralded as masterpieces–it’s not like he suddenly decided to declare an apathetic war on continuity. It’s done deliberately and it’s done subtly enough that you’ll be left turning to your movie buddy and asking, “Did you just see what I think I did?”
My major qualms with the film are the ending. The twist didn’t feel like a huge epiphany. The film ends ambiguously enough that if you didn’t read the novel, you’d be able to make a case for whether or not the turn existed or not. Either way, it’s certainly a film that deserves at least two viewings: one to experience the surprise at the film’s ending and another to relish in all the clues left for the audience to decipher.
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