Island Fever

I’m a sucker for psychological thrillers. There’s something about the darkness of the topic and the way they always seem to explore some aspect of the human mind that appeals to me. That’s one of the reasons why I liked playing video games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill so much when they first came out. The darkness and the mystery involved were scary but at the same time, very appealing. In the hands of a modern maestro like Martin Scorsese, I had very high expectations for his take on the psychological thriller genre with Shutter Island. After a bit of a rough start, I found myself liking it.

In 1954, United States Marshall Edward “Ted” Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from the Ashecliff Hospital on Shutter Island on the outskirts of Boston. The prisoner, Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer) seems to have vanished into thin air. As he asks the head psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) for assistance in the investigation, we find out that Daniels lost his wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) to a fire and that he served in World War II during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau. Strange things continue to happen around the island and Daniels is convinced that Dr. Cawley and the hospital staff are covering something up. Even as Daniels tries desperately to get to the bottom of things, he learns some things about himself that he might not be able to handle.

To say that Martin Scorsese is a master of modern cinema isn’t much of a stretch. The man has made some of the greatest films of all time such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed. He doesn’t just direct gangster movies or sports films as he’s managed to cross genres with ease. The last time he directed something similar in tone, it was the great remake of Cape Fear featuring Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte back in 1991. In the case of Shutter Island, the film starts off quite slow. There’s a whole lot of exposition required to set the tone here and it takes a bit of a while to see why that happens.

DiCaprio seems to really be at his best when Scorsese directs him. Much like Scorsese and Robert De Niro worked fantastically from the 1970s to the 1990s, so have the director and DiCaprio been amazing in the 2000s and beyond. His portrayal of the hardnosed investigator starts off by being subtle, but as you peel the layers away, he starts showing depths to the personality just as we see depths to his story. By the time we get to the twist in the ending, you’re feeling all kinds of empathy, horror, and sadness for the character.

Kingsley has been relegated to character roles over the decades, but that doesn’t make his performance any less stunning. Seeing him on the screen with DiCaprio and the great Max Von Sydow is a real treat because actors of this caliber so rarely appear in a scene together, let alone a single motion picture. Michelle Williams is also pretty effective as Daniels’ dead wife, someone who haunts him and is the root of all of his issues.

As I mentioned earlier, the slow pace at the start of the film can really bore you if all your concentration isn’t on the film in front of you. Despite the ominous tone set once Daniels and Aule arrive at the island, and in spite of the investigation going through thunderstorms and cover-ups, it still feels slow. At some point though, Shutter Island felt like those old school games I wrote about. I guess nowadays with movies being done based on video games and vice versa, that was inevitable, and it’s not like I didn’t like that comparison in the first place.

Again, I can’t repeat enough that the payoff to Shutter Island occurs near the end of the movie when the twist happens in the story. When the twist happens, you find yourself thinking back to how the film started and how certain things that you might have neglected are suddenly significant now. I just felt that Scorsese could have gotten to that twist at a quicker pace than what he did in this example.