Director: Dennis Lehane
Writer: Laeta Kalogridis
Cast:
Ted Levine as Warden
Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy Daniels
Mark Ruffalo as Chuck Aule
Max von Sydow as Dr. Naehring
Michelle Williams as Dolores
Jackie Earle Haley as George
Ben Kingsley as Dr. Cawley
Genre: Drama, mystery, thriller
Time: 138 Minutes
"Shutter Island", according to me, will start its work on us with the first musical notes under the Paramount logo's mountain, even before the film starts. I think they're ominous and doomy. And so is the film. This is Martin Scorsese's evocation of the delicious shuddering fear we feel when horror movies are about something and don't release all the tension with action scenes.
Story's prime location is a fortress or rather a haunted castle (for me) at the Shutter Island. We are told that it's a remote and craggy island off Boston, where the Civil War-era fort has been converted as an asylum for insane criminal prisoners. In the opening scene, we approach the island by boat through lowering skies, and I know that the feeling is something like the approach to King Kong's island: Looming in gloom from the sea, but here, it fills the visitor with dread. To this island travel U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo).
It's 1954, and they are assigned to investigate the disappearance of a child murderer (Emily Mortimer). There seems to be no way to leave the island alive. On the island itself, both officers are disconcerted by sudden bad weather preventing them from leaving, and the fact that the prison chief, smoothly amiable and pipe-smoking Dr. Cawley, seems to have been granted authority to do more or less as he wishes on his remote island kingdom. To the cops' disgust, Dr. Cawley explains his liberal therapies for the psychotic murderers in his care. He disapproves of brutal lobotomies and electric shocks, preferring a radical new approach of letting the patients cathartically work through and act out their anxieties. The fact that Dr. Cawley's associate Dr. Nähring is German, triggers traumatic memories. Teddy was one of the US soldiers who liberated Dachau; to him, Shutter Island has distinct similarities, and little by little, he suspects that the government has secretly enlisted certain qualified foreigners to help with psychological research here, using patients as guinea pigs. More even than this, secluded Shutter Island may simply have evolved into the doctors' private sociopathic fiefdom, a mad, dysfunctional sect where they do as they like – and have no intention of letting suspicious police officers ever leave. The Flashbacks in the film suggest Teddy's traumas in the decade since World War II. That war, its prologue, and the aftermath supplied the dark undercurrent of classic film noir. The term "post-traumatic shock syndrome" was not then in use, but its symptoms could be seen in men attempting to look confident in their facades of unstyled suits, subdued ties, heavy smoking and fedoras pulled low against the rain. DiCaprio and Ruffalo both affect this look, but DiCaprio makes it seem more like a hopeful disguise. The film's primary effect is on the senses. Everything is brought together into a disturbing foreshadow of dreadful secrets. How did this woman escape from a locked cell in a locked ward in the old fort, its walls thick enough to withstand cannon fire? Why do Cawley and his sinister colleague Dr. Naehring (Max Von Sydow, ready to play chess with Death) seem to be concealing something? Why is even such a pleasant person as the deputy warden not quite convincingly friendly? (He's played by John Carroll Lynch, Marge's husband in "Fargo," so you can sense how nice he should be.) Why do the methods in the prison trigger flashbacks to Teddy's memories of helping to liberate a Nazi death camp? These kinds of questions are at the heart of film noir.
You may read reviews of "Shutter Island" complaining that the ending blindsides you. I accept there's a number of twists and turns coming out of the blue in the movie. Even I was flabbergasted while watching the end. In the end, all of those ideas are unified in one final statement. This statement is the film's unifying factor and if it is missed, as it has been by most, then the film feels disconnected. The film ends with Andrew relapsing into insanity causing the need for his lobotomy. But before he receives the lobotomy, the film hints that he may be receiving the lobotomy voluntarily by merely acting insane. Andrew has the presence of mind to ask Dr. Sheehan a very cognitive question. “Is it better to live as a monster, or die a good man?”.
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