By Brendan Barnes, Staff Writer
Returning to theaters for the first time since releasing the Academy Award winning film “The Departed” (2006), director Martin Scorsese follows up his previous success with “Shutter Island.”
Adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane, “Shutter Island” follows weary federal agent Teddy Daniels, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, as he investigates the possible escape of a mental patient from the Shutter Island Insane Asylum, and finds his investigation to be much more personal than he had imagined.
From beginning to end – and especially the end – “Shutter Island” is a straitjacket of suspense that hardly ever pauses to breathe and conjures up memories of the golden age of psychological thrillers, like “Psycho” and “Vertigo.” Rather than opting for cheap thrills and generic loud noises that startle rather than scare, Scorsese carefully constructs the film’s peaks of suspense so that the audience is as in the dark as the characters.
Although a brooding, dissonant score accompanies a great deal of the film, silence is the most disturbing feature of the film. At some points, the tension reaches such a height that the simple crack of a match is enough to send even the most rigid viewers out of their seats.
The island’s isolation, an approaching storm, decaying architecture and the presence of dangerous mental patients all illustrate the complex psychological fabric that Daniels is forced to deal with. As we learn at the beginning, Daniels is a widower, whose wife and daughter were killed in an apartment fire started by a neighbor. Daniels’ motivation in the case becomes even more convoluted when we learn that the fire starter is now a patient in the asylum’s most dangerous ward, a supremely Gothic converted Civil War-era fort.
To make matters worse, the asylum’s guards as well as the head psychiatrist, Dr Cawley, played by a quietly unnerving Ben Kingsley, constantly stifle the investigation’s progress. Emily Mortimer, playing the escaped patient Rachel Solando, is superb in her few scenes, fleshing out her character’s psychosis to an eerie level with chilling dialogue and piercing eyes.
Sleep plays an important part in “Shutter Island” and the film is peppered with dream sequences. They are as gripping as they are disturbing, ranging from Daniels’ memories of his troubled experiences in the Second World War to visions of his dead wife, played by a solid Michelle Williams who steals each of her scenes. Alternating between ‘real’ and ‘dream’ worlds, Scorsese manages to create a world where truth is unable to be grasped by anyone, especially Daniels, and where rest is not an escape from, but is actually a trap of the subconscious.
These realizations are at the heart of what makes “Shutter Island” such a mesmerizing destination. The audience is at the mercy of film, not the other way around, which is a refreshing change of pace from the predictability of contemporary cinema. As one of Shutter Island’s patients aptly tells Daniels, “You’re a rat in a maze.” This comment, fittingly, applies more to the audience because “Shutter Island” contains more twists and turns than the labyrinthine mental hospital.
But the rapid shifting of sympathies and ideas that the film is bound to set in motion does not take away from the connectedness of “Shutter Island;” it is an observation that nothing we know anymore is complete. Walking out of the theater thoroughly puzzled, it is difficult to imagine that this confusion was not Scorcese’s ultimate intention from the very beginning.
Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) talk with Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) in “Shutter Island.” (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)