Scorcese crafts masterpiece with 'Shutter Island'

John Donne, a 17th century English writer once wrote, “No man is an island,” meaning that human beings do not thrive when they are isolated from others. The warden, guards, and creators of the asylum for the criminally insane on Shutter Island must not have ever heard of Donne.

“Shutter Island” opens with an immense amount of fog, allowing the audience to barely see what lies just beyond the horizon. Interestingly enough, the film plays out in a very similar fashion. “The Departed” director Martin Scorsese illustrates how the things that cannot be explained clearly by the mind are sometimes the most horrifying.

The year is 1954. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Edward “Teddy” Daniels, a United States federal “mah-shall,” sent to Shutter Island with his partner Chuck Aule, played by “Zodiac’s” Mark Ruffalo, to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner/patient named Rachel Solando, Emily Mortimer. According to everyone in the facility, Rachel’s cell was guarded around the clock and Dr. Cawley, played with just the right amount of creepiness by Sir Ben Kingsley, seems to think “It’s as if she evaporated, straight through the walls.”

However, the disappearance of Rachel is only the first of Teddy’s problems.

He suffers from reoccurring memories of war and extermination camps, his wife who died from smoke inhalation while her apartment was on fire, and the knowledge that the man responsible for the death of his wife, Andrew Laeddis, is one of the 66 criminally insane, patients on the island. To make matters worse, Teddy progressively starts hallucinating more and more and wonders if some of the things he’s seeing are actually real.

“Shutter Island” expertly messes with your head in its 137-minute running time and keeps you on edge from beginning to end.

DiCaprio and Scorsese are the two main people to thank for this. DiCaprio’s performance is nothing short of brilliant. He has to channel so many different emotions throughout the course of the film and truly allows the audience to feel exactly what he’s feeling at all times. DiCaprio will be picking up his fourth Oscar nomination for this emotionally complex and challenging role.

And does anything really need to be said about Scorsese? The man knows how to direct a film and creates a palpable sense of dread and tension as Teddy navigates his way throughout the different halls and corridors of the island’s asylum.

“Shutter Island” is a masterfully made psychological, mind-puzzle of a film that will seriously get inside your head and stay there. By the end of the film, it should be pretty clear what has just unfolded on screen. Or is it?

Final rating: 4 out of 4 stars

Reach Aaron Fenn at: lifestyle@thepolypost.com