Shutter Island

I love it when a brilliant director decides to make a good old fashioned genre film: Such is the case with Shutter Island, a twitchy, twisty, psychological horror film, directed with obvious glee by Martin Scorsese with nods to Alfred Hitchcock and the best traditions of film noir and pulp fiction.

In 1952, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardio DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) have been sent by ferry to the Shutter Island asylum for the criminally insane to investigate the escape of a prisoner.

Once they arrive, the "no exit" aspect of this island comes into high relief. And the island becomes its own ominous character—craggy rocks and cliffs, swaying trees, foreboding stone buildings. The patients, likewise, are hunched, toothless, menacing—exactly what the genre calls for.

A film like this is all about paranoia. "You'll never get off this island," one person after the next whispers to Teddy in conspiratorial tones. Does the hospital have secrets? Are they really conducting dangerous experiments on the patients for profit? Is Teddy getting too close to the truth?

We see right away that Teddy is not a reliable narrator. He has migraines and sleepless nights, and is haunted by  memories of his dead wife (Michelle Williams) and a particularly gruesome mission at the Dachau concentration camp when he served in WWII.  But he's also a standard noir gum shoe—all overcoats and fedoras and cavalier disregard for authority. (However, when Teddy and Chuck get caught in a storm and are forced to change into hospital whites; there's a scary dynamic shift: Suddenly they look more like patients than cops.)

Likewise, how are we to feel about the courtly, but ever-so-slightly sinister head of the hospital (Ben Kingsley) who is clearly withholding information from the two Marshals? Why is his house so luxurious?  (Just for good measure, Max von Sydow is on hand as the hospital's head psychiatrist: A German! Teddy has seen up close what they can do to the weak.)

Shutter Island is thick, almost lugubrious, with dread and anxiety—but Scorsese's precise direction and DiCaprio's urgent performance keep it moving until its humdinger of a climax.

Pay close attention to what Kingsley's Dr. Crawley says to Teddy when he comes into the light tower (of course there's a light tower). It was that line—and the memory of Teddy's fate—that kept me up at night with a good old fashioned case of the heebie jeebies. Thanks, Marty.