Shutter island movie trailer

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” is a pretty terrible movie but I can’t just leave it at that. It’s the kind of bad movie only very talented people could make, and that gives it a fascination. I watched it in a state of rapt bewilderment.Leonardo DiCaprio, who has made almost as many movies by now with Scorsese as Robert De Niro, plays US Marshal Teddy Daniels, who, with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), is summoned to the forbidding, totally isolated Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a mental patient and murderess from the Ashecliffe psychiatric hospital. The time is cold-war-era 1954, which only adds to the already paranoid atmosphere. Zombiefied patients eyeball the marshals with blank fury; doctors in residence, including the elegant Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and the German-accented Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), seem by turns accommodating and sinister. Nothing is what it seems on this island, except maybe the weather, which kicks into Gothic hurricane mode halfway through.

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Shutter island cast and crew

Directed by
Martin Scorsese


Leonardo DiCaprio  

Mark Ruffalo

Ben Kingsley

Max von Sydow

Michelle Williams

Emily Mortimer

Patricia Clarkson

Jackie Earle

Ted Levine

Shutter island movieoverview

Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s fourth screen collaboration, is a psychological mystery thriller that takes place in 1954 and harks back to that era’s edgy film noir classics and exquisitely suggestive horror films. In look and mood, it recalls such B movie gems as Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim and Isle of the Dead, and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man, films which Scorsese screened during production for his cast and crew.

Scorsese’s movie, however, is based on a 2003 book by Dennis Lehane (author of Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone) and opens with Di Caprio’s US marshal Teddy Daniels and new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) crossing Boston Harbour by ferry to reach the Ashecliffe hospital for the criminally insane on craggy, storm-buffeted Shutter Island. They’re going there to search for missing patient Rachel Solando, a woman who murdered her children.

Her disappearance is a locked-room mystery. Solando has vanished from her fastened cell, a hurricane is raging outside and there’s no way off the island.
The puzzle is enough to give anyone a headache, but DiCaprio’s Daniels has them already: debilitating migraines that leave him feeling wrecked. As if this weren’t disorienting enough, he’s also haunted by the past – by the death of his wife in an arsonist’s fire and by his experiences as a WWII GI present at the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. The medication he’s taking confuses his perceptions still further.

What is going on? Whom can he trust? Is head psychiatrist Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley) really the humane clinician he claims to be? What should he make of Cawley’s sinister German (ex-Nazi?) colleague Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow)? And what are they up to in the island’s lighthouse?

Throw in twitchy patients and menacing staff, not to mention the looming shadows of McCarthyism, the Cold War, H-bombs, lobotomies and psychotropic drugs, and it’s no wonder that Daniels finds it hard to keep his balance. And no wonder, as he plunges down dark corridors and dangles off cliff faces in a desperate bid to solve the mystery, that a chasm of madness and paranoia should open up vertiginously beneath his feet.
Scorsese intensifies the delirium at every opportunity. With bleeding chunks from such 20th-century modernists as Ligeti and Penderecki throbbing and shrieking on the soundtrack, he keeps the tension at a pitch of near-constant hysteria.

Yet when the solution to the mystery is finally revealed, you’re left with a sense of disappointment – even if you haven’t already guessed the payoff. Is that all? Those old B movies to which Scorsese is paying homage usually had running times of around 70 minutes. At 138 minutes, Shutter Island is almost exactly twice as long. Unsurprising then that it feels as though a pulp story has been bulked out and blown up until it collapses from the strain. Think of all the money, energy and skill Scorsese has expended on the effort. That really is mad.

Shutter island movie review

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” is a pretty terrible movie but I can’t just leave it at that. It’s the kind of bad movie only very talented people could make, and that gives it a fascination. I watched it in a state of rapt bewilderment.Leonardo DiCaprio, who has made almost as many movies by now with Scorsese as Robert De Niro, plays US Marshal Teddy Daniels, who, with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), is summoned to the forbidding, totally isolated Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a mental patient and murderess from the Ashecliffe psychiatric hospital. The time is cold-war-era 1954, which only adds to the already paranoid atmosphere. Zombiefied patients eyeball the marshals with blank fury; doctors in residence, including the elegant Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and the German-accented Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), seem by turns accommodating and sinister. Nothing is what it seems on this island, except maybe the weather, which kicks into Gothic hurricane mode halfway through.

To an even greater extent than Quentin Tarantino, Scorsese is our leading film director-as-archivist. His movies are riddled with oddments and swipes and homages from the entire history of film, and none more so than “Shutter Island” (which screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis adapted from Dennis Lehane’s 2003 bestseller). It’s fun, in a film-school kind of way, to pick out the references: “Out of the Past,” “Laura,” “Isle of the Dead,” and so forth. And yet no one but Scorsese could have made this film. For one thing, no one else could so obsessively have bound all these movie references together.

But the question I kept asking myself throughout this overlong movie is: Why bother? Scorsese has made many movies in many modes, from “Raging Bull” to “Age of Innocence,” and he deserves as much as any filmmaker alive the right to punch out a commercial project. But “Shutter Island” isn’t as strictly commercial as, say, the egregious “Cape Fear.” Even though Scorsese tricks the movie up with all manner of old-school frights, complete with buckets of blood and doomy music on the soundtrack, he’s more ambitious than that. He wants to create a madman’s universe patterned not only on cold-war creepies like “Shock Corridor” but also on German Expressionist classics like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” He wants to show us how the tactics of horror schlockmeisters can give rise to art.