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This 2010 Psychological Thriller Is a Mind-Bending Team-Up for Martin Scorsese & Leonardo DiCaprio
Is Leonardo DiCaprio’s prison a place for mental patients… or a prison of the mind?
Right from its first queasy images of a lawman shaking off nausea to set foot on an island prison for disturbed felons, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (stream it here on Peacock!) sets a mood. Brooding skies, rakish angles, and lingering camera pans that capture horror in the faces of the criminally insane — there’s something sneakily Arkham-esque about it all. It's noir-ish and gothic and, for Scorsese, something just a little bit off the gritty real world’s mundane path.
Shutter Island isn’t quite a horror film, nor a supernatural one. But with a period setting that freely evokes another era’s grotesque medical treatments, not to mention a protagonist holding the loosest of grips on sanity, it draws Scorsese closer to genre territory than almost any other film in the iconic director’s vast catalog.
Who's really running the spooky asylum in Shutter Island?
Scorsese doesn’t shrink from Shutter Island’s highly-stylized scary elements, which are definitely there by design. Adapted from the same-named novel by author Dennis Lehane, the movie’s book-based source material pays intentional homage to the freaky, pulpy fear that lurks in neo-noir’s darkest corners. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a twitchy U.S. Marshal (who may or may not go by two names), shadowed by a supportive cop partner (Mark Ruffalo) as the pair sets out to investigate the disappearance of one of the prison-island’s 67 demented (and dangerous) patients.
Getting deeper into the movie’s plot runs the risk of spoiling its well-choreographed thrills, but it’s fair to say that Shutter Island is a story about seizing control of your own point of view — and then making a choice about what to do with it. Over the course of the film, DiCaprio’s cop character (we’ll call him “Teddy”) descends from clear-thinking competence into outright madness, goaded in his dreams by visions of wartime death-camp horrors as well as a more personal tragedy he can’t quite see for what it truly is.
Populating Teddy’s mental menagerie on the island are Ben Kingsley and the late, great Max von Sydow as the hospital’s two leading psychiatrists, plying the newfangled 1950s idea of treating even murderously vicious mental patients as people rather than as irredeemable lab rats. Michelle Williams appears in dreams and flashbacks as Teddy’s dead wife Dolores, while Emily Mortimer tugs at Teddy’s sympathies as a filicidal mother with a tricky role in the missing-persons case that’s hard for him to pin down.
From Taxi Driver to Raging Bull to Goodfellas and more, one of Scorsese’s greatest gifts is his unmatched ability to pick an audience up and drop them directly behind the eyes of his main characters — to see and interpret a movie’s world directly through their point of view. That skill has never been sharper (or more vital to a film’s plot) than it is in Shutter Island, where we go exploring all of the island’s creepy secrets with Teddy as our (only sometimes) reliable guide.
It’s possible to take in all the film’s shocking surprises in just one watch. But it’s just as likely that, as the credits roll, the late cascade of “aha!” revelations about who these people really are and the roles they’ve been playing all along will compel you to start from the beginning again — just to see where its thriller of a story laid its first fateful breadcrumbs and clues.
Shutter Island isn’t Scorsese’s only horror-adjacent dance with suspense at the movies; his 1991 Cape Fear remake, along with 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead (and, to an extent, even 2016’s Silence) all skirt either the scary or the supernatural to varying degrees. But with spooky season right at our doorstep, it’s among his most atmospheric and haunting and — even at 139 minutes — his most narratively compact. Trying to figure out its central mystery, you’ll inevitably feel rudderless precisely at those moments when things start to get truly tense. But it’s all but guaranteed you won’t ever be watching the clock.
Stream Shutter Island on Peacock here.
