SHUTTER ISLAND (2010)

As a ferry chugs towards the infamous Shutter Island, with thick grey clouds hanging heavy like a baleful portent, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) buries his face in the toilet, loudly heaving with sea-sickness: “It’s only water… it’s only water…” He tries to deny the nausea, to bury it and keep it down. However, the closer he gets to Shutter Island, and the more he understands what happens on this barren rock, Teddy begins to see how there are truths that cannot be denied. Some memories, thoughts, and sensations won’t be kept down. And there are those mysteries in life that must be uncovered, no matter how much one might want to bury them. 

Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Marshal, who’s investigating the disappearance of a missing patient. When he and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) meet Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), suspicions grow steadily: something is not right about this case. When entering the insane asylum, a gaunt patient, with sunken eyes and a balding scalp, looks at Teddy and smiles. She places a gnarled finger upon her cracked lips: “Shhh…” There are secrets in this place, horrors which are fiercely concealed. 

It’s a realisation that Teddy can’t avoid; the facts don’t add up. After all, how could Rachel have escaped her cell when it was locked from the outside and the windows were barred? What is the rule of four? Who is 67? And what has Andrew Laeddis, an arsonist and psychotic killer, got to do with all of this? As these questions abound, Teddy realises that he can’t trust anyone—possibly not even himself. 

Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is a tour de force of suspense, suspicion, and paranoia. A psychological thriller with a palpable atmosphere that few films can match, Shutter Island remains an uncommonly immersive tale, one that’s deftly crafted by all involved. With performances that mesmerise, compositions that are darkly scintillating, and profound themes that are delicately woven into the story’s thrilling tapestry, Shutter Island is a riveting film that draws in the viewer and holds their attention, regardless of how well you know the story.

This is partly because Laeta Kalogridis ably incorporates the best parts of Lehane’s novel: our screenwriter never sacrifices theme for tension, nor tension for theme. Instead, the dark, twisted horrors of Shutter Island, the unsettling depictions of mental illness, and the unnerving rumours of what transpires in that foreboding lighthouse all reflect the story’s themes. As Teddy arrives at the institution, a plaque reads: “Remember us for we too have lived, loved, and laughed.” It serves as a stark reminder that those who are most vulnerable in society—the sick, the old, or the poor—are often forgotten, when it’s precisely these individuals who require the most aid. 

In this respect, Shutter Island at first appears to be a dystopian nightmare, a netherworld where society’s rejects are abused by an authoritarian ruling class. Indeed, Scorsese’s depiction of life on the island appears insidiously totalitarian, with the scores of doctors and orderlies imparting a sense of Orwellian dread: we can neither discern precisely what the threat is, nor where it’s coming from, but it’s abundantly clear that a discomfiting power imbalance is at play. 

This sense of unease is compounded by Dr Cawley’s description of medical procedures which are only just considered outdated: trepanning with screws through the skull, submerging patients in icy water until they lose consciousness, or even drown. And perhaps the most sinister of all, the newly fashioned frontal lobotomy, used more and more commonly as a means to ensure docility and calm from the more unruly patients. 

To any onlookers, it immediately smacks of clinical sadism, a perverted combination of science and barbarism that falls right within Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. The treatment of these patients as mere bodies and brains, meat sacs from which information should be gleaned, feels horrifyingly reminiscent of Nazi experiments, or the crimes against humanity that occurred within the Japanese Unit 731. We are made just as anxious as our protagonist Teddy because we feel he’s slowly being stripped of his means to defend himself: they’re telling him he’s crazy, which is tantamount to dehumanising him. 

Maybe we behave in this way because God loves violence, and he’s instilled the same kind of morbid fascination and capacity for evil within us. Or at least, so says the Warden (Ted Levine), who shamelessly basks in his proclivity for violence, recognising Teddy as an animalistic, kindred spirit: “You’re as violent as they come. I know this, because I’m as violent as they come.” He points to the destruction that’s occurred on the island as a result of the hurricane, to the uprooted trees and dislodged stones. Violence is everywhere. It’s to be celebrated. And it’s for this reason he smiles, with a twinkle in his eye, when he grips Teddy’s shoulder and pulls him in close to him: “If I was to sink my teeth into your eye right now, would you be able to stop me before I blinded you?”

What makes Shutter Island such a disquieting film is its preoccupation with violence as evolution, both in kind and degree. Since the dawn of time, man has inflicted pain and suffering on one another, but how this aggression is imparted has shifted. The H-Bomb is brought up at least twice, as a manic patient describes the terror of being scorched to ash, with entire cities being reduced to smouldering rubble; the sheer devastation sounds like the ravings of a disturbed mind, but are instead the unfathomable realities of a disturbed world. Meanwhile, the threat of scientific violence looms, as patients mutter almost incoherent fears about what goes on in the lighthouse.

Lehane’s book appears to assert that aggression is something so deeply ingrained into our DNA that we cannot escape it, and we’re entering a world where we are increasingly adept at being violent. The story suggests that if we don’t master our predisposition for aggression, we will annihilate ourselves: whether through the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons or acting on vicious impulses that leave one utterly isolated, violence will lead to our irrevocable ruination if it’s not healed at the source.

This is all relevant because Teddy’s central issue, his defining neurosis, is that he cannot bear to view himself as a violent man. He’s haunted by the atrocities he committed, both on home soil and at concentration camps in Germany. None of his crimes can be defined as acts of war; they were murders of the defenseless, pure and simple. It’s for this reason that Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow) asks Teddy, quite pointedly: “Do you believe in God, Marshal?” If those who unjustly wielded violence in this life are not punished, they will face divine judgement in the next. Of course, this is not something that Teddy needs to be told—he’s more than aware that judgement awaits him. 

Because as much as Shutter Island is an exploration of the mysteries that dwell inside the human mind, it’s truly a story about the locks, chains, and iron bars we place across our wounded hearts. More than anything, Teddy desires atonement for his sins. However, he knows that if he ever tried to forgive himself, he’d be opening up a Pandora’s box of suffering; he doesn’t believe he’d survive the wave of guilt that would come after acknowledging his crimes. It would simply crush him outright.

Teddy frequently refers to the patients on Shutter Island as prisoners, intentionally implying that the entire compound is one glorified penitentiary. This, of course, serves as an allegory: Teddy’s in jail, but it’s a jail of his own making. And ultimately, the prison is not his mind—it’s the guard. The real prison that he’s been locked deeply inside is the prison of his own heart. Perhaps it’s for this reason that he keeps on saying: “I have to get off this island, Chuck.”  

He wants to escape to a place where the agony of his memory won’t follow him, where his heartache won’t hurt him any longer. Teddy wants to run away from the pain, not treat it. However, this is part of the problem. As Dr Naehring informs him later on in the story: “Wounds can create monsters, and you, you are wounded, Marshal. And wouldn’t you agree, when you see a monster, you… you must stop it?” Teddy, I’m sure, would wholeheartedly agree, which is precisely why he denies the existence of his past. 

In Scorsese’s psychological thriller, there’s symbolism to be found everywhere that hints at Teddy’s central problem. In the first shot, we see Teddy gazing deep into a mirror, which hints at his fractured psyche. In Cawley’s office, a copy of William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar hangs on the wall, the painting being a depiction of the Babylonian King who went insane and was lost to a bout of depraved madness for seven years. Only when Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged the truth (in the Old Testament story, this consists of him recognising God as the one true power) was his sanity restored to him. Such an old tale reflects Teddy’s tragic predicament.

Even the title itself is symbolic: Shutter Island, which simultaneously serves as an anagram for truths and lies (or truths/denials), even sounds like the answer to Teddy’s unresolved trauma: shot her. Additionally, when Teddy reveals his notepad to Chuck, his lead markings begin to run down the paper as the rain makes his writing opaque and difficult to decipher. This could hint at the unreliability of information that pervades Shutter Island. Teddy insists that nobody could take his memories away from him, but his own memories can’t be trusted, and much like his scribblings in his notepad, they’ve become so deformed as time and tragedy eroded them that they’re no longer representative of what they once were.

All these weighty themes are contained within a story that could thrive on atmosphere alone. Thunder, lightning, and shattering winds provide our mystery with an inauspicious mood. The captain of the ferry ominously intones that the port is the only way on or off the island, and the storm that’s steadily encroaching threatens to be calamitous. Meanwhile, orderlies seem strangely untrustworthy, and Dr John Cawley moves about with a suspicious poise.

It truly does seem that no one can be trusted, and Kalogridis imbues tension into her locked-room script superlatively. Paranoia mounts as Teddy is no longer sure who’s telling the truth: the patients contained within the asylum, or the doctors who confine them there. As George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley) tells Teddy: “You’re not investigating anything. You’re a fucking rat in a maze.” Teddy’s worsening situation feels like a Kafkaesque nightmare, the claustrophobic tribulations of a man who’s caught in an elaborate, tortuous trap, like Josef K. in The Trial, or the unfortunate mouse in A Little Fable. Once declared insane, there’s no means by which he can counter the diagnosis. It’s the perfect Catch-22.

As paranoia mounts, with Teddy fearful of cigarettes, drinking water, and aspirin, one can understand why David Fincher was once attached to direct the project. Truthfully, there’s an argument that he could have done the film even greater justice than Scorsese. Between The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Fincher’s shown he’s uncommonly adept at crafting paranoid thrillers with unreliable narrators at the helm.

Still, Scorsese directs just as masterfully as ever, once again demonstrating his versatility. You’d be forgiven for doubting this was the same man who directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). With director of photography Robert Richardson, Scorsese never allows a single shot to go underutilised. Each camera angle is perfectly done and obviously pays homage to the style of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, while the compositions are superb. Shadows on Teddy’s face, illuminated with harsh chiaroscuro lighting, even subtly hint at the dual split in his identity.

Moreover, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is deft and intentionally fractured. Your eye will spot continuity errors, but they proliferate to such a degree that you suspect something is off. Something, in fact, is not as it appears. It’s not a technical error, but a shrewd stylistic choice: we’re being given an insight into Teddy’s broken perception. It’s for this reason that a glass of water disappears from a person’s hand, or that a blouse mysteriously moves from a patient onto his dead wife. This sense of uncertainty is only augmented by the ceaseless flashbacks, creating a non-linear surrealism that conveys the sensation of insanity: as separate stories merge, we can no longer be sure what the past truly holds—much like Teddy.

Shutter Island begins as a brilliant puzzle, though it doesn’t provide an answer to our original riddle. Instead, we’re given a solution to a different question, and becomes a far more poignant film than we had initially expected. While the story is superbly tense and exceptionally stylish, these aren’t the things you take with you when the credits roll. Rather, you’re left wondering about those moments in your own life that you keep buried in your heart, and the stories you repeatedly tell yourself, like a tape playing over and over, to keep from seeing the truth: that some places never let you go, and some memories can never be forgotten.

USA | 2010 | 138 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • GERMAN

Cast & Crew

director: Martin Scorsese.
writer: Laeta Kalogridis (based on the novel by Dennis Lehane).
starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley & Ted Levine.