Review: Shutter Island (2010)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                        SHUTTER ISLAND
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Martin Scorsese turns his hand to directing
     a psychological horror film.  Two United States
     Marshals travel to an island off Massachusetts that
     is a cross between Alcatraz and an asylum for the
     criminally insane.  The film is very moody and the
     plot is twisty and supremely melodramatic, though
     few of the twists seem like new ideas.  Fans of
     psychological horror may have seen the material
     before, but rarely so much of it and rarely is the
     tone so perfectly presented.  Laeta Kalogridis wrote
     the screenplay based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.
     I suspect this film is Scorsese's tribute to German
     Expressionism.  Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

Shutter Island is a dismal piece of rock off the Massachusetts
coast.  It still houses a Civil War fort, but now, in 1954, the
fort and two more wards make up Ashecliffe Hospital for the
Criminally Insane, part asylum and part fortified prison.  Leonardo
DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels and Mark Ruffalo is Chuck Aule, two
United States Marshals who are sent to Shutter Island to help look
for Rachel Solando. Solando is an inmate who killed her own
children and has somehow impossibly escaped from a locked cell.
She is either dead or still on the island some place in hiding.
The two marshals will need all the help they can get, but from the
first moments on the island the marshals clearly are not going to
get much cooperation from the staff.

 From early on, this seems to be a plot suffering from a case of
extreme over-stuffedness.  Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and
Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow) may be doing fiendish medical
experiments on the inmates.  But nobody will believe the inmates
when they tell because they are considered insane.  Also one of the
inmates may be the man responsible for the death of Daniels's wife.
Meanwhile, Daniels seems to be drifting into schizophrenia and sees
his dead wife visit him.  And when he dreams, his nightmares are
terrible.  Daniels is troubled by memories of an atrocity he took
part in during the liberation of Dachau.  Besides the creepy fort
that is now a ward for the worst patients, there is also a creepy
old lighthouse that can be reached only at low tide and which may
house horrible experiments performed by the staff of the asylum.  A
category 5 hurricane is about to hit the island and may level the
prison and/or drown the inmates chained to the floor.  In the dark
of the moon a beast from 20,000 fathoms wades ashore and topples
the lighthouse.  (Okay, I admit I made the last one up.  The rest
are real.)  This is a longish 138 minutes of story, but it takes a
director of genius to pack all of that into even a film of that
length.

Most horror films have retread plots and if the plot-pieces of
SHUTTER ISLAND are not so original, at least their profusion in a
single story is.  What is refreshing is the stylistic return to
some of the conventions of German Expressionism of the 1920s and
1930s.  In few films since the early Universal horror films (which
liberally borrowed German Expressionism) have we seen such
evocative visuals.  This film seems to hark back to the German
horror of NOSFERATU and THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, and to even
greater German horrors at places like Dachau.

It is a surprise to see Martin Scorsese making a horror film when
his most successful films have been crime stories.  In fact, he
seems to be a lover of all kinds of films and this film is in some
ways a tribute both to the 1930s horror film and the 1950s crime
film.  DiCaprio and Ruffalo look pretty good in slouchy 1950s hats
and coats.  Scorsese even has a little nod to 1958's THE FLY when
he borrows the line "I said catch them, not kill them."  The film
is just a little too long and the logic needs some rationalizations
by the viewer, but logic problems are a hallmark of the old horror
films.

Scorsese has made a horror film for film lovers.  I rate SHUTTER
ISLAND a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1198124-shutter_island/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2010 Mark R. Leeper