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The Artist

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

Driven by Elizabeth Olsen’s mesmerising lead performance, this languid and unsettling story buries deep into your mind

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Shutter Island (Film)

by Erin Free | February 15, 2010 18:05 | Edited February 22, 2010 17:48

Although bogged down with its denouement, this is still Scorsese, which means genre cinema at its visionary best.

At first glance, Shutter Island looks like a major commercial detour for revered director Martin Scorsese, with the film's trailer and promotional materials awash with creepy goings-on and lots of things going bump in the night. As with his previous films The Departed and Cape Fear, however, Scorsese once again shows that his stabs at genre filmmaking aren't exactly like those of lesser directors. Though his gifts for visual storytelling are always obvious and in plain sight, it is Scorsese's choice of material that really sets him apart from the rest of the pack. Shutter Island is filled with florid, exciting moments, broiling tension and beautifully crafted scares, but it also courses with a sense of sadness and despair that announce its intentions as altogether different.

 

US Marshall Teddy Daniels (a fine performance from Scorsese regular Leonardo DiCaprio, who never quite seems to get the recognition that he deserves) looks like your standard fifties cop: tilted fedora, hardnosed attitude, ever present cigarette. He is also, however, severely damaged goods. Daniels is haunted by the ugliness of what he saw and did at the end of WW2 when thrown amidst the apocalyptic ashes of The Holocaust, while cruel memories of his dead wife (Michelle Williams) plague him day and night. When he arrives on Shutter Island - an isolated, wave-lashed prison for the criminally insane just off the coast of Boston - the already tortured Teddy will be put through a physical and metaphysical hell. Though on the island to investigate the disappearance of a female prisoner, the determined cop's suspicions are soon raised about the institution's officious head doctor (a fairly restrained Sir Ben Kingsley) and his colleague (Max Von Sydow), leading to claims of conspiracy and medical malfeasance.

 

Scorsese obviously enjoys toying with genre here, welling up a horrible, ominous atmosphere right from the film's opening frames and casting an astounding selection of oddball character actors (Ted Levine, Jackie Earle Haley, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson join the aforementioned Kingsley and Von Sydow) to serve as dangling red herrings in the unfolding mystery. The director's control of mood and imagery is outstanding, as he makes the rocky, inhospitable Shutter Island another character in the story, and cannily injects musical cues at just the right moments.

 

While the film becomes bogged down toward the end by large, sticky, near-indigestible chunks of plot exposition, the story navigates toward a cove of moral horror rarely visited by big budget studio films. That gives Shutter Island a mildly unsatisfying aftertaste, but it also marks the film as a work of ironically quiet bravery from a director putting his own indelible spin on a big, scary piece of genre filmmaking.