Shutter Island (15)

Alison Rowat's Review

Recall the most sweat-lashed flu dream you’ve ever had and it still wouldn’t come close to Martin Scorsese’s beguiling Shutter Island.

This is Scorsese’s flawed but heartfelt love letter to Hollywood psychodramas, those great, gothic tempests in which men were men, and usually crazed with it, with equally troubled women haunting their every move.

Older moviegoers will be at home with the melodramatic, noirish style. Younger audiences may need tutoring beforehand and counselling afterwards. If you’re somewhere in the middle, prepare to be confused for a long time, perhaps even irritated, yet ultimately end up satisfied. Shutter Island is a long way from Scorsese’s best; one to file under “S” for something different than “C” for classic, but it’s a refreshing change from everything else doing the rounds.

The picture begins in dense fog and pretty much stays there. It’s 1954 and federal marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio, looking like a boy wearing his dad’s suit) and his partner Chuck (the excellent Mark Ruffalo) are on a ferry from Boston. Their destination: a hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island. A female patient has disappeared, an unusual occurrence given that, like Alcatraz, there is no way off the island without risking death or serious injury. What’s more baffling is that the room from which she escaped was later found to be still locked.

It’s a terrific set-up, one that begs to have The Twilight Zone theme tune strike up immediately, but it is just a taster for the banquet of puzzles to follow. Grab a plate and your wits – you’ll need them.

In charge of the hospital are two psychiatrists, played by Ben Kingsley, on crisp, enigmatic form, and Max von Sydow, an actor who can steal a scene just by showing his face. Doctors Cawley and Naehring (von Sydow) are not Teddy’s kind of people. The straight-talking Boston boy, vowels thicker than clam chowder, is impatient with their talk of “patients” rather than prisoners, and he dislikes their patronising attitude towards him. Above all, he loathes Naehring’s German accent for taking him back to a place and time he never wants to revisit.

The screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis (Night Watch), from Dennis Lehane’s novel, makes skilful use of Teddy’s soldiering past. Like many a psychodrama hero, Teddy’s experiences in the war, in his case helping to liberate the concentration camps, explain much about his make-up.

Psychodramas such as Laura and Shock Corridor could trace their roots to real-life conflict. The Second World War had brought many European writers and directors to Hollywood. Several American directors had seen active service. Still trailing the shadows of Old Europe with them, it was their troubled imaginings, complete with battle-scarred heroes, that played to audiences in the mood for escapist melodrama. After all, in a world that had just turned itself upside down, nothing could seem too over the top.

All of which makes one wonder what today’s audiences will make of Shutter Island. From the busting-out-of-the-frame acting style to a score that is nerve jangling even in the quieter moments, there’s a lot about Shutter Island to leave the modern viewer discombobulated.

And that’s before they even begin to make sense of the story. As Teddy and Chuck tug on the thread that might begin to explain the strange happenings on the island, I could occasionally feel my own faculties beginning to unravel. Throw in flashbacks and dream sequences galore and Shutter Island brings on a raging desire for a nice lie down in a darkened room to make sense of it all. The story is absurdly convoluted, with some of the sequences seeming not to belong at all.

But while you wait for the story to click into place – it does, and very satisfyingly so – there are other things to savour. DiCaprio’s performance, for a start. If you thought that once-babyish face of his was looking careworn in The Departed, see what noirish lighting does to it here. He is a natural leading man for this kind of material, able to keep an audience intrigued and watching however much things appear to go awry. The scenes with Max von Sydow are priceless.

Then there’s the sumptuous look of the piece, and the way that a story that seemed to be all over the place suddenly grabs you by the lapels. Scorsese has the usual A team on his side, and it shows: cinematography by Robert Richardson (Inglourious Basterds, The Aviator), editing by Thelma Schoonmaker (The Departed, Gangs of New York, Goodfellas, Raging Bull), and production design by Dante Ferretti (Sweeney Todd, The Black Dahlia).

Last week this spot was home to a review of Tim Burton’s disappointing Alice in Wonderland. For a walk on the really wild side of cinema try Shutter Island instead, a film that’s not so much through the looking glass as through a glass, darkly. Mind how you go in that fog.

Paul Greenwood's Review

Author Dennis Lehane must be one of a very small group of writers who can claim that film adaptations of their work have met with uniform success.

His previous novels, Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, have been brought to the screen in Oscar worthy fashion and while Shutter Island may arrive without quite the same moral depth that has categorised Lehane’s work, as a big budget B-movie blessed with a quality cast and a legendary director, it’s hard to beat for sheer entertainment value.

Set in 1954, it takes place almost entirely on the remote Shutter Island in Boston Harbour, which is home to a hospital for the criminally insane.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays US marshal Teddy Daniels, who is called along with partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to the island to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner who seemingly vanished from her cell.

A secretive staff aren’t offering much help and the men running the hospital (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow) seem to have plenty to hide. Teddy is often traumatised by flashbacks to his wartime experiences where his platoon liberated a concentration camp and the horrors he saw there.

On top of that his wife was killed a couple of years earlier and Teddy thinks her killer might also be on the island.

If it had begun with the words ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, Shutter Island couldn’t have been more of a pulp fiction.

The ominous score and fog-bound visuals scream lurid melodrama from the very first frame, as a boat emerges from an unnaturally thick mist, generating an air of suspicion and mistrust from the off.

It’s a crackpot but wildly entertaining blend of Agatha Christie and Scooby Doo, a rattling thriller full of rain-lashed locations and vicious black humour.

The early parts consist mainly of Teddy and Chuck interviewing staff and patients and even this quietly grips. As it becomes increasingly fevered, Scorsese turns the screw, layering on the twists and revelations.

Its brilliance in the later stages is that even we don’t know what the truth is, all the way to a knockout finale that’s open to interpretation.

Now that De Niro prefers to play it safe with his movie choices, Scorsese has found his new muse in the shape of DiCaprio, and Shutter Island marks their fourth time working together.

DiCaprio is impressively authoritative, grabbing the film by the throat and shaking it vigorously in Teddy’s unyielding quest for the truth. But Scorsese rolls out one great actor after another, with von Sydow especially memorable and great character actors like Elias Koteas and Ted Levine adding flavoursome backup.

Rip-roaring, at times demented and at times thought-provoking, Shutter Island manages to combine some of the best elements of The Wicker Man, Total Recall and Alfred Hitchcock and there maybe isn’t a higher recommendation than that.