Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow Director: Martin Scorsese Category: IIB
'Personally, doctor, I'd have to say: screw their sense of calm,' says Leonardo DiCaprio's US marshal Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island, in a sharp riposte to a psychiatrist's views about using a soft approach to rehabilitate the criminally insane.
The tough talk, however, might as well be Martin Scorsese's own warning about how he wants to jolt his audience out of their comfort zone. His 21st feature film drew elements from the police procedural and horror genres, spiced the mix with conspiracy drama that hinted at contemporary US socio-politics, and delivered an intriguing piece about peril and paranoia.
Based on a Dennis Lehane novel from 2003, Shutter Island is set in 1954, when the post-war calm is replaced by a general sense of unease, courtesy of political witch-hunts, the stifling conformity dictated by consumption-led lifestyles and the beginning of the cold war. These serve as the backdrop to Daniels' arrival at Ashecliffe Hospital, a high-security mental institution situated on Shutter Island, off Boston; his mission is to investigate the disappearance of an inmate who was locked up, as he later learns, because she murdered three of her children.
As Daniels (above) wades deeper into the case, the more disoriented he becomes. The twists and turns he confronts on the island are heightened by constant nightmares, revealing a heavily traumatic past that saw him struggle to confront the carnage he witnessed while liberating the Dachau death camp in Germany. There are also recurrent images of his wife Dolores (Michelle Williams), whom Daniels remembers as having died in a fire set by an arsonist he suspects to be also incarcerated at Ashecliffe.
Slowly, the past and the present morph together. Daniels confides in his new colleague, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), about the deadly projects he believes Ashecliffe's top brass - headed by the benign-looking psychiatrist John Crawley (Ben Kingsley) and harsh hospital chief Jeremiah Naehring (Max von Sydow) - is conducting, and how he can't allow things he fought against in the second world war to happen in his home country - only to discover that in an age of anxiety, it is one's own psyche that looks like a foreign country.