DiCaprio, having grown perhaps overly fond of his accent from “The Departed,” brings it along for the ride, and it spreads through the movie like a contagious disease. The vessel of these anxieties is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Teddy Daniels, a United States marshal taking a ferry ride out to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Scorsese uses his considerable formal dexterity his intimate, comprehensive understanding of how sound and image work together to create meanings and moods to conjure a tingly atmosphere of uncertainty and dread. At first everything is fine, or at least not quite right in a way that seems agreeably intriguing. Like Shutter Island in the opening scenes, the full dimensions of the catastrophe come into view only gradually. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself, directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a peculiar contraption of a thriller by Dennis Lehane. The wail of strangled cellos accompanies shots of the titular island, a sinister, rain-lashed outcropping that is home to a mental hospital for the CRIMINALLY INSANE! The color scheme is lurid, and the camera movements telegraph anxiety. I’m sorry, that should be OFF THE COAST OF MASSACHUSETTS! IN 1954! since every detail and incident in the movie, however minor, is subjected to frantic, almost demented (and not always unenjoyable) amplification. Because someone is trying to drive them insane.“Shutter Island” takes place off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954. The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island. Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?.Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before?.Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes?.How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room?.Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?Īs the investigation deepens, the questions only mount: Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffes radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them.īut nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems.

Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Shutter island de dennis lehane