Shutter Island is a neo-noir psychological thriller film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Laeta Kalogridis. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as U.S. Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels, who is investigating a psychiatric facility on Shutter Island after one of the patients goes missing. Mark Ruffalo plays his partner officer Chuck Aule; Ben Kingsley is the facility’s lead psychiatrist; Max von Sydow is a German doctor; and Michelle Williams is Daniels’s wife.
The movie happens to be based on Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel of the same name. The movie opened to rave reviews back in 2010 and was also one of the most profitable movies of that year. The movie was praised on the basis of a newness in the work of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Shutter Island- Cast and Characters
Leonardo DiCaprio as Edward “Teddy” Daniels
Mark Ruffalo as Chuck Aule
Ben Kingsley as Dr. John Cawley
Max von Sydow as Dr. Jeremiah Naehring
Michelle Williams as Dolores Chanal
Emily Mortimer as Rachel Solando 1
Patricia Clarkson as Rachel Solando 2
Jackie Earle Haley as George Noyce
Ted Levine as Warden
John Carroll Lynch as Deputy Warden McPherson
Elias Koteas as Andrew Laeddis
Ruby Jerins as Little Girl
Robin Bartlett as Bridget Kearns
Christopher Denham as Peter Breene
At The Movie Culture, there’s nothing we like more than having our minds bent by movies. Whether we’re wrapping our brains around multiple layers of dreamland alternate-reality, witnessing a ballerina totally losing her shit, or watching a dude explore the intricacies of Interstellar time travel, we tend to absolutely love it when our movies turn our brains into thinking is there more to the story itself. And arguably, few films are quite as mind-bendy as Martin Scorsese’s 2010 thriller, Shutter Island. Shutter Island has more twists and turns than Casino, Goodfellas or even The Departed, but we’ve always found the reveal at the end to be more than vaguely predictable. I
n the late 90s and early 2000s a lot of movies featured a twist revealing our protagonist’s warped perspective: Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, The Machinist, Identity, etc. Coming out in 2010, it seemed like Shutter Island was a little late to the party, leaving us at The Movie Culture wondering… Is that all there is to it? Is this movie as smart as you’d expect from one of world’s most celebrated filmmakers? Is there something deeper going on? We are going to dig and dive into Martin Scorsese vision for the Shutter Island and we’ll see if there’s more to know than what Shutter Island shows us.
Alright guys let’s do a little recap: Shutter Island places us in a creepy mental institution made creepier by its convenient isolation from society vis-a-vis a shit-ton of water. Leo plays ugly-tie-wearing Teddy, a US Marshall investigating the disappearance of Rachel Solando, one of the island’s dangerous criminal inmates whose favorite hobbies include drowning her children and then blacking out. Soon, we meet the requisite sketchy psychiatrists, including one who’s definitely Nazi-curious.
When head shrink Dr. Cawley proves shady and doesn’t cooperate with the investigation, things seem increasingly more sinister. All the while, Teddy has a ton of trippy flashbacks, reliving the various traumas of his life ranging from liberating the Dachau concentration camp to losing his wife to a fire. Also, turns out that the guy who started said fire, Andrew Leidis, is at this mental institution and Teddy wants to track him down. This whole mission culminates in him “discovering” the “real” Rachel Solando hanging out by an international rat convention, claiming to be a psychiatrist who discovered that the doctors are using lobotomies and experiments as part of a top-secret government program to develop mind control techniques. If that’s any sign, it’s the sign that things are about to get wilder: we find out that Teddy is actually Andrew, who became psychotic after killing his wife because she killed their three children. On top of that, his entire investigation was actually just an elaborate mental experiment conducted by the asylum to help rid Teddy or maybe Andrew of his illusions as a slightly-demented form of role-play therapy while presumably also giving this doctor & patient amateur acting troupe a chance to show off their chops.
Oh also, unless Leonardo DiCaprio acknowledges the truth about his past, and accepts the totality of his identity, he’s going to be lobotomized. He’s like “hard pass” and heads up to the creepy lighthouse to go get his brain jiggled by chopsticks. The end! Even if you’ve seen Shutter Island, that synopsis might read like your most ADHD friend trying to get through a campfire story. It’s helpful here to contextualize this movie as a homage to high and lowbrow film noir traditions. Film noir was the catch-all phrase for this special brand of film that particularly flourished post World-War 2. It featured dark shadows, unreliable narrators, weird-angled shots, and perhaps most iconically: plots that involve plenty of unexpected twists and dramatic reveals, but maybe aren’t 100% airtight.
All of the above could just as easily describe Shutter Island. Indeed, this film is almost pulpy in the way it purely revels in every noir trope — from the creepy cemetery to the fantastical dream sequences to the narrator with the slowly-revealed “dark past,” especially one rooted in World War II. With mental asylums, a looming tall building — in this case a lighthouse, creepy staircases, casual semi-Nazis, and more, the film almost reads like a grab-bag of noir traditions that Scorsese was deliberately evoking noir is important in parsing the film. That’s because in general, noir films are less concerned with narrative coherence than they are with mood, atmosphere, and conveying the psychological condition, usually suffering, of their protagonist.
We’re going to treat Shutter Island like a noir and say upfront, the narrative plot has a lot of turns and arguably doesn’t add up. But that’s almost literally irrelevant. What’s more interesting is whether the film compellingly depicts Teddy’s psychological condition, and in the process, reveals anything about us slash humanity at large. So with that caveat, let’s dive in. At its core, Shutter Island is about a man who refuses to acknowledge large swaths of his inner self and so he creates an alternate reality. We don’t want to but if we actually compare it to Inception we will find that indeed Teddy’s closed himself off from the traumas of his past, and can only reckon with those memories by dreaming them or projecting them onto other people’s lives — hence conjuring Rachel Solando and Leidis. He’s living in a fantasy world lurking with sinister, presumably imagined, threats. His disconnection with his own identity is almost immediately established in one of the first shots when we see Teddy examining his own face in a shaky mirror. He’s just puked his guts out, suggesting an inner discordance and inability to orient himself. The mirror perhaps indicates the duplicity inherent to his character. From there, Scorcese uses every tool in his cinematic toolbox to convey this warped reality.
Most literally, the film employs an estimated 650 special effects including blue screen mattes, digital painting, 3D computer effects and even digital miniatures. While plenty of movies use a crap ton of special effects, they’re generally employed to achieve visual believe-ability. Here, all of the special effects work to create a slightly artificial reality. This is fitting for a movie in which 90% of the action takes place inside a giant, performative charade undertaken by the world’s most dramatically talented shrinks. It’s even more fitting for a narrative viewed entirely through the eyes of a man literally living in a fantasy world.
Examples of this artificiality include the rear projection inspired of the ocean and sky behind the boat when the men arrive at Shutter Island, the artificial appeal of this gloomy setting, and the almost absurdly-thick, dream-like layer of fog in the movie’s opening shot. At the same time, the perspective is purposefully disjointed, with instances of almost deliberately sloppy editing, like in the boat sequence when Teddy’s partner’s mouth is out of sync with his words until it cuts to a reverse shot, at which point it’s suddenly in sync: “How long you been with the marshalls?” “4 Years” “So you know how small it is?” “Sure.” “How ‘bout you? You got a girl?” A similar effect is achieved in the first flashback, when Teddy’s wife starts talking before we see her mouth move, followed by another jarring cut: “Remember when we stayed in the cabin in the summer, Teddy?” “We were so happy.” “She’s here, you can’t leave.” Here, the contrasting use of jarring dutch angles in accordance, along with inaccurate sound syncing, serves to dismantle us and rattle our perspective, an imitation of Teddy’s rattled psyche.
In another instance, when the men are being introduced to the buildings on the island — there’s a whip pan which sloppily hides an editing cut, as if Teddy hesitates for a moment in keeping up the charade while staring at familiar buildings. All of these interruptions are entirely intentional meant to jolt us, just as Teddy’s psyche is being jolted with memories. The sound-design also reflects Teddy’s heightened sense of fear and paranoia. Sometimes, the sound is too loud, as with the initial over-the-top ship noises that don’t coincide with the actual waves, creating a sense of hyper-reality fitting for a character with no grasp on the truth.
Other times the sound is unnaturally quiet, as when they’re entering Ward C, and we see a lot more rain than we can hear. Throughout, during moments of high tension, sounds and music are ramped up beyond mere dramatics from the extreme introduction to the island to the thunderstorm that booms after Teddy gets a disturbing note from one of the patients. Other visual elements help situate us in Teddy’s mind. As the film’s director of photography Robert Richardson, put that Colors in particular play an important role from the very beginning. Teddy’s false reality on Shutter Island is de-saturated and vaguely dismal. These segments are far less vivid than his fantasies and dreams, which take place in hyper-saturated hues inspired by 1950s-era Kodachrome film. That they feel hyper-real suggests that Teddy’s dreamworld is more palpable to him than the world around him, and helps us understand just how vivid his delusions really are. While much of the present-day scenes are filled with gloomy grays and blues, it doesn’t stay this way the entire movie feels like The colors become increasingly brighter, almost blinding, in moments when Teddy comes close to discovering the truth or has an encounter that jiggles his memory crescendoing like the music but in this scene, which is filled with flashes of light, perhaps literally representing the way the truth will “shine a light” on Teddy’s delusions. In fact, Teddy even walks right into the light as his doctor delivers the final blow of reality, showing him photos of his dead children,and he falls into a halo of brightness and collapses after remembering these painful experiences.
In the final scene, the grounds of the asylum are nearly as saturated as his fantasies, suggesting that he is fully, or at least more so, present in reality. Scorsese doesn’t only rely on the strength of his own movie to convey this theme. See, Scorsese is a Grade A film nerd, and that nerdiness is on full display in Shutter Island. The film is littered with references to other movies, especially film noirs, but also other classics about madness and psychosis like Suspiria and Shock Corridor. His clearest influence, though, is Alfred Hitchcock, who popularized the modern use of the “psychological subjectivity via an unreliable narrator” trope.
Martin Scorsese even had his crew watch Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man” in preparation for shooting Shutter Island. As the eagle-eyed viewers we are at The Movie Culture these homages range from a shower head spouting water like in Psycho, to climbing a narrow stairway like in Vertigo, to hanging off of a cliff like Cary Grant, in North by Northwest, to this creative shot of a gun like in Spellbound, to this tree flying through a wall like in Marnie. What’s more, the use of blue screen boards and technical paintings is reminiscent of the technology Hitchcock would use when situating his characters in unfilmable backgrounds. Another famous director, Stanley Kubrick, gets a shoutout too. The looming tracking shots that put us directly in Teddy’s physical movements deliberately evoke a similar technique that Kubrick innovatively employed in The Shining as a means of more accurately conveying subjectivity through cinematography. Similarly, the choice to use music by one of Kubrick’s favored compositions which evokes the master’s work. We could spend ages parsing the film for every reference, but we think you get the point.
Martin Scorsese is infusing his film with all the major cinematic trappings of subjectivity and unreliable narration to put us directly in Teddy’s shoes. So Scorsese is certainly using a lot of cool techniques to make the movie more effective, but does that mean that Shutter Island is trying to say something here? Maybe yes and maybe no, but we are not going to leave the topic of Shutter Island unless we’re going meta. All of these devices are actually reinforcing a major theme of the film that we need to empathize with people experiencing mental illness, rather than writing them off as crazy or un-treatable. This is Dr Cawley’s position to begin with, that you should treat patients like human beings and see them as capable of growth and improvement, even if they’ve committed violent crimes.
Just as Kinglsey sees them as sympathetic, saying: “My job is to treat my patients, not their victims. I’m not here to judge.” We too learn to view them as sympathetic by seeing the world through an actual patient’s perspective. At the beginning, these patients are regarded by the camera as freaks and spectacles, to be viewed from afar and nervously ignored. By the end, we’ve engaged with many of them as human beings, and most importantly, we’ve been thrust into Teddy’s subjectivity. We’ve seen his struggle firsthand, thereby making us recognize his unmistakable humanity. As a result, we know that, despite the whole killing his wife thing, Teddy’s a pretty caring dude with some genuinely good qualities.
If we had met Teddy as an inmate early on, we would have regarded him as merely insane, not unlike Teddy does when he first surveys the island’s patients. The film seems to rather blatantly articulate its thesis statement via this written plaque at the beginning of the film, which reads: We’re forced by nature of the cinematic experience to sympathize with people whom society typically ignores or overlooks. Cinema’s one of the only art forms that can so easily immerse us in someone else’s experience, and we think that makes it a pretty powerful thing, and Shutter Island a pretty powerful film. But all of this is in the service of the central question being posed by the film that is, Can you accept yourself if you are living with evil or should we even try to? Throughout Shutter Island, Teddy makes his position very clear, Evil is black and white to him. He doesn’t see the inmates at Shutter Island as worthy of reformation because they’ve committed violent crimes. “He’s defenders, right? They’ve hurt people, murdered them in some cases.” “In almost all cases, yes.” “And personally, doctor, I’d have to say screw their sense of calm.” He also refuses to give a dying Nazi a gun so he can end the pain, and he’s the first soldier to start shooting at the Nazis after the Allies have raided the camp. In contrast, Dr. Cawley makes clear his opposing view that no person is beyond redemption or rehabilitation. These two opposing views are complicated when we learn that Teddy is in fact an inmate whom Cawley is currently attempting to rehabilitate.
The film addresses this question most compellingly though, through its use of flashbacks to memories that Teddy can’t process without dissociating from. What the film seems to argue is that what we consider “evil” is really just the sum result of trauma mixed with mental instability. We can recognize that Teddy isn’t evil, and in doing so, have to question whether anybody really is. Except What about Nazis?? Well, what makes this film so interesting is that it isn’t so one-sided on the issue of evil it leaves us to decide for ourselves. Teddy doesn’t reconcile his trauma and suddenly believe that people can be rehabilitated. Quite the opposite. Instead, it seems like he chooses to be taken to the lighthouse to be lobotomized. “Which would be worse? To live as a monster or die as a good man?” Here, he seems to be explaining his two choices: Live with the knowledge of what he’s done or metaphorically “die” vis a vis a stick in his brain while still under the illusion that he is a good guy. Here, we see Teddy appearing to affirm his belief stated throughout the movie — that the violently criminal cannot be reformed, that he is not capable of change or growing past his mistakes.
Upon close analysis, it becomes pretty clear that every cinematic element from lighting to coloring to production design to cinematography to music cues was carefully chosen in order to serve the higher themes of Shutter Island with those being the subjectivity of film, the nature of insanity, the redemptive potential of the criminal and the very nature of evil. Hence we think Martin Scorsese made a movie that is both resemblance of the past such as Alfred Hitchcock films and also that is more modern such as films from David Fincher and Stanley Kubrick, Shutter Island in more ways is a modern masterpiece and one of Scorsese’s best. For a director to finally move away from his iconic Gangster movies and to do a movie which is a psychological thriller with Shutter Island and nailing it in every sense, is an achievement mediocre directors could possibly not achieve.
Shutter Island- Martin Scorsese
We know Martin Scorsese from films like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Casino, Goodfellas, the Departed, Wolf of Wall Street and recent movie The Irishman. If we look closely there’s a difference between genre of Shutter Island and all those movies. A director who is known his entire life as a guy who makes Gangster movie, makes something like Shutter Island. Although Martin Scorsese uses the same themes that he has in almost every movie and character that he has ever directed, shutter Island still feels like a movie from a different director and that director is on top of his game.
Well in all conclusion, the director is Still Martin Scorsese. Shutter Island is also a start of Scorsese’s different genre movie that he has made in the last 10 years. Hugo, his first and only Pg-13 movie based on Scorsese’s love for Cinema, Wolf of Wall Street, a zany story of Jordan Bellfort and the practices of Wall Street and Silence, a spiritual undertaking which questions the very idea of faith. Last 10 years of Martin Scorsese’s filmography is something that cements Scorsese can make more movies like Shutter Island.
If you look at the movie from Martin Scorsese’s perspective the movie can be an allegory for Scorsese’s faith, similar to Garfield’s character in Silence, where Garfield is finding himself in a dilemma to believe God or not, similarly in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is trying to understand whether what Teddy is seeing, is something that is to be believed or to believe something that is not visible. A proper allegory for faith and religion which has been an important part of Scorsese’s filmography and characters including films like Mean Streets, Temptation of the Christ, Silence and Shutter Island.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese
The collaboration between Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese began from a film called The Gangs of New York, the pair collaborated on the Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island came along and then the Wolf Of Wall Street. They are set to team up on a new movie called the Killer of the Flower Moon. The trust between the two is one of the many reasons why Shutter Island works as a film. If it was any other Director who was asking a lead actor to play a killer Nazi, who is a psycho and doesn’t wanna believe what he did, would be a tough task, but because it’s Martin Scorsese and....(continue reading)