Shutter Island

Shutter Island

By Jonathan Fisher, February 24th, 2010

Editor’s note: This review, while not containing explicit spoilers, hints at the resolution of Shutter Island. If you think you’re perceptive enough to guess the ending based on my intimations, I’d advise watching the movie before reading the review.

I guessed the ending of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island about fifteen minutes into the film, but strangely enough that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of it. I had uncovered the ‘why’ of Shutter Island, but rather enjoyed Martin Scorsese revealing the ‘how’. From the first chimes of the film’s ominous score, and the first frame of the film’s opening credits, I knew what Scorsese was trying to do. Shutter Island harks back to the Hitchcock psychological thrillers of the 50s and 60s, which in turn were inspired by movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the first mind-bending thriller that flipped reality on the audience in a truly effective way. Once your mind begins to wander towards the possible ending of Shutter Island, it seems that there is no other way the movie could end… unless you’ve been duped by the film in the same way its protagonist has been duped by his surrounding characters.


The film begins in 1954, as Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have a discussion on a boat as they head toward a spooky-looking island. We are told that these two men are US Marshalls, sent to Shutter Island, an asylum for the criminally insane, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of one of the inmates, Rachel Salondo (Emily Mortimer) -- a woman who drowned her three children before drying them, dressing them, and eating a meal at the dinner table with them. The asylum’s warden, played by Ben Kingsley, tells the Marshalls of the curious nature of the woman’s disappearance. She simply vanished from her room, even when the door was locked and the window bolted. “It was as though she evaporated, straight through the walls,” the warden expounds mysteriously. We get the sense from the warden immediately that he knows something that we don’t. It’s a credit to Kingsley’s performance that the warden can never truly be considered as the film’s potential villain, though. We sense that he is keeping something from Teddy, and from the audience, but it doesn’t feel as though it's necessarily malevolent.

Teddy is occasionally plagued by flashbacks to his time as a soldier in World War II, and Scorsese constructs these flashbacks and incorporates them into the story magnificently. Piles of dead bodies, a Nazi soldier who bungled an attempt to kill himself by shooting himself in the head, and a seemingly off-the-cuff mass execution of dozens of Nazi soldiers haunt Teddy. The mortification with which Scorsese films these scenes makes us understand why.

As well as the flashbacks, which are explicable, Teddy is also haunted by strange dreams, which initially are not. In these dreams, Teddy sees his deceased wife (Michelle Williams), and a little girl which, we are told, belonged to Rachel Salondo. The little girl keeps asking Teddy why he didn’t save her.

By the third or fourth dream sequence, we begin to sense that something is a little askew in Shutter Island. Teddy’s sanity is clearly deteriorating, but we’re not sure if it’s because of a conspiracy on the island, or because Teddy is actually insane. Eventually his investigation instinctually leads him to the light-house on the island, which we learn has more significance than we originally thought -- but again, we don‘t know why. Reality and truth seem to be fluid, and eventually it’s nearly impossible to tell which character’s psyche we are meant to have faith in.

Martin Scorsese creates a sense of unease the best way he knows how -- through his directing. Specifically, through using continuity errors deliberately in order to subliminally suggest that something is wonky. For instance, a woman drinks a glass of water. We see Teddy fill up the glass, and hand it to her. In the next shot, the woman quickly throws the glass back -- but there is no glass in her hand. The shot lasts for less than a second, and less astute audience members may miss the error, but subliminally they will notice the discord. There are at least four occasions in which errors like this happen, and each time they force us to question, ‘just what is going on here?’

Most of Scorsese’s protagonists are outsiders, unable to reconcile their own shattered perspective on the world with those of their peers. That theme is again present in Shutter Island, and it’s curious to note that while Scorsese has moved steadily between genres -- a sports movie (Raging Bull), a character piece (Taxi Driver), a religious examination (The Last Temptation of Christ), and gangster movies (Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed and Gangs of New York) -- that element remains. Something about a character that is not completely in control of the world around him, who finds himself becoming increasingly isolated because of his twisted uniqueness, resonates with Scorsese. Perhaps it is because of his intensely Catholic upbringing, or his incomparable genius behind the camera.

Shutter Island is a fascinating psychological thriller, and contains several truly scary sequences, but it feels like a lesser Scorsese work. In essence, it is a pulpy genre piece elevated by the master behind its camera -- just like Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear seventeen years ago. Scorsese has often subscribed to the “one for them, one for me” policy -- directing one movie for his studio to appease their desire for a ‘safe’ hit, then another more personal project that probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the studio movie. This is not necessarily a bad thing -- Scorsese still does genre pieces better than anyone working today, primarily because he grew up devouring as many genre movies as he could. Observational as he is, Scorsese learned well from the best exponents of these genres, and now as a 65-year-old is applying his knowledge and experience to create homages as well as entertainments. You may guess the ending of Shutter Island as early as I did, but chances are it will still startle you, and for a day or two after, the imagined scenes of just what goes on in that lighthouse may haunt you.