Shutter Island

Four trailers were attached to Shutter Island. Two remakes (Death at a Funeral and Clash of the Titans) and two sequels (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Iron Man 2). I was at the end of my rope. I hadn’t seen a good movie in weeks and it seems as if Hollywood didn’t have an original thought left in its empty head. Then a gallant knight arrived in the form of Martin Scorsese. For some two hours and eighteen minutes I was taken on a cerebral trip that was mysterious, scary, clever, emotional, and surreal.


Set in 1954, the film follows U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) as they try to unweave a mystery on ominous Shutter Island, which houses criminally insane patients. They are trying to find a patient that escaped from her room by impossible means. “We don't know how she got out of her room. It's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls," says Dr. John Cawley, played with a sort of terrifying charm by Sir Ben Kingsley. Everyone on the island seems suspicious and acts as if they are hiding something, and it seems as if Daniels and Aule will not make it off the island intact. To top it off, Daniels is haunted frequently by past memories of the death of his wife and Nazi concentration camps he saw during the war.

Scorsese’s first psychological horror film is a classic. It raises so many questions, messes with your head, and scares the crap out of you all in one. Many viewers will feel cheated by the end, which answers all the questions to the plot in an often misused Hollywood fashion. But the movie isn’t about finding the answers to the plot, but more about the questions raised by the fantastic story. Scorsese saved the best question for last, so stick around for the final scene, it is a good one. And it sums up the theme of the film: how we consciously feed our subconscious lies to suppress bad memories, and how those lies can become reality if we let them. All in all, Scorsese has woven a horrifyingly terrific classic that is entertaining, thought provoking, and cinematically pleasing.