Shutter Island begins with a ferry ride from Boston to a hospital for the criminally insane. It's 1954 and Marshall Daniels(Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner (Mark Ruffalo) are sent to the island because one of the patients has vanished, "it's as though she evaporated straight through the walls" the head doctor(Ben Kinsley) explains.
As the film evolves we learn that the hospital is not what it seems. The doctors who run it, Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, may be using the inmates for medical experiments and von Sydow may have been a Nazi. And, we also learn, there's more going with DiCaprio's Marshall Teddy Daniels than may at first appear. So, Scorsese sets up a hospital that has secrets inside it alongside a main character who has secrets inside him. And, boy, does he have secrets inside him.
He's haunted by images of nazi concentration camps he helped liberate as an American solider, along with visitations from his wife who was killed by a fire set by an arsonist he believes is a patient in the hospital. Daniels tells his partner he jumped on the investigation, for the express purpose of getting to his wife's killer. Both of these back stories are told through some rather brilliant visions Daniels has, not in his head, but right in front of his eyes. In the most striking, his wife melts to ash as she burns in his arms. These visions are stylish and send the film lurching off from a cop story with a revenge twist into almost a ghostly psychological thriller. It gets more twisted when we find out that the doctors may have been feeding Marshall Daniels hallucinogens to thwart his investigation.
Without giving out any spoilers, in the second half of the film we don't know what's real or paranoid or drug-induced or truth or lies. It really is quite a disarming experience.
Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, and adapted by screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, Scorsese's Shutter Island is something pretty special, an island landscape that's both darkly beautiful and effortlessly creepy, juxtaposed with Marshall Daniels' darkly beautiful and creepy visions.
I'm not sure all the visions tie together in the end, the whole Nazi concentration camp thing seemed to be milked for effect rather than actually adding to the story. When we find out what's really going on with DiCaprio's Marshall(this is one of his very best performances by the way), it seems even more superfluous and kinda generic. I guess the idea was that Von Syndow may have been a Nazi, so let's tie him together with the main character via concentration camps.
Aside from that, this is a very stylish, well-paced and visionary movie in a lot of ways. It requires the viewer to pay attention to what's going on- a small price to pay (although one most movie-goers these days are not used to paying ) for such a twisted, atmospheric and mature work.
Rating
Presentation: 31
Plot : 29
Character: 28
Total: 88
