Like Vertigo, to describe the plot beyond the opening set-up will ruin the experience for the viewer. Shutter Island, like the Dennis Lehane novel it was based upon, is a mystery. It begins with two federal marshals approaching Shutter Island on a ferry to investigate the disappearance of a missing patient in the mid-1950s. One of the marshals, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is nauseous from sea-sickness and haunted by memories of his dead wife (Michelle Williams), who burned to death in an apartment fire. His assigned partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), seems young and fresh in comparison, just there to do his job but earnestly empathetic to Teddy.

The pair arrives on Shutter Island, a prison for the mentally insane and dangerous, to meet with the head psychiatrist on staff, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kinsley), who explains the disappearance of Rachel Solando. Somehow this woman escaped from her cell despite locks, guards, and barricades, traveled barefoot through a hurricane, and cannot be found on a small island with no way off. Marshal Teddy Daniels, already getting a weird vibe from the institution and the staff’s initial lack of cooperation, suspects there is something more sinister going on than a simple disappearance. After all, there doesn’t seem to be any way this woman could have escaped on her own; indeed, it doesn’t seem she could have escaped without the help of the entire population of the island. But then, if the entire island is involved, why would the staff call federal marshals to investigate the crime they were guilty of? These are the central questions, and we begin to suspect that Teddy Daniels may not be able to leave the island as easily as he arrived.

Fans of the Dennis Lehane novel should be pleased by this incredibly faithful adaptation. Only a few variations occur. Scorsese expands upon Teddy’s memories of witnessing the Dachau concentration camps during the war, but these scenes feel out of place in a thriller that is already too long, and co mparing Shutter Island to Dachau seems exploitative. But the biggest complaint audiences are likely to have with the film is quite faithful to the source material: the solution to the mystery is not only too predictable, but too implausible. After an entire film that avoids the cheap thrills of the genre, an audience expects better than a second-rate trick as the solution to the mystery. This hackneyed solution is the worst flaw of both the novel and the film, and unfortunately does not hold up to scrutiny.

Leonardo DiCaprio (Inception) gives a strong, if ultimately unrelatable, performance that is reminiscent of his obsessive portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator. This is DiCaprio’s fourth team-up with Scorsese, following Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed, and they have several future projects are already in development. For Scorsese fans, this means you had better become DiCaprio fans as well, as their pairing is unlikely to end soon. But DiCaprio is limited in Shutter Island but the confines of a bland character, and although he does as good a job as anyone could with the material, his character is still forgettable.

Perhaps the most memorable person in Shutter Island is Michelle Williams, even though she only appears in dreams, flashbacks, and hallucinations. Williams is perhaps the only actor to have escaped the WB teen drama Dawson’s Creek with a real acting career, building creditability by choosing mostly supporting roles in critically-acclaimed films like Brokeback Mountain, I’m Not There, Synecdoche, New York, and Wendy and Lucy, one of her few but effective starring roles. In Shutter Island, she’s given a character that is primarily a plot-device in an otherwise male-centered film, and pulls off the potentially campy dialogue of her underwritten character. She even manages to upstage DiCaprio in their scenes together, both in pathos and wardrobe, a feat no other actor in the film is allowed.

At this point in his career, Scorsese has such prestige that incredibly talented actors are willing to take small, nearly cameo roles in his film. Max von Sydow (The Seventh Seal), Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen), Patricia Clarkson (Vicky Christina Barcelona) all have barely more than one scene each. Scorsese recruits Ted Levine and John Carroll Lynch to add to the creepiness, as they both played serial killers in The Silence of the Lambs and Zodiac, respectably. Ben Kingsley, who not coincidentally appeared in Schindler’s List, gets the most screen time of the supporting cast, but doesn’t get a scene equal to those with much less screen time.

Martin Scorsese pulls from his vast cinematic knowledge to pepper Shutter Island with visual allusions and cultural shudders. We can see influences from some of Scorsese’s favorite films: Leonardo DiCaprio running up a spiral staircase right out of The Red Shoes, the showerhead shot of Psycho (Image 9), and a lake landscape reminiscent of Leave Her to Heaven. At the opening, we see the marshal’s car drive up to the hospital from an aerial shot, quite similar to the long aerial shots at the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The entire opening has a Kubrickian feeling, with many scenes of choreographed symmetrical frames and a bombastic score. (Image 5) By doing so, Scorsese not only mimics the techniques that made The Shining creepy, he also links his film on a subconscious level with the terror felt during Kubrick’s film.

There are also various reminders to the horrors of the Holocaust beyond the flashbacks themselves. Falling ashes appear prominently, and obviously, in Teddy’s memories of Dachau, but are then mirrored in the falling papers in an office (Image 16), the burnt ash from Dolores’s burning apartment (Image 14), and when Dolores turns to ash in Teddy’s arms. (Image 15) Even the opening shot, as we move through the entrance of Shutter Island, reminds one of entering a concentration camp, and its corresponding sense of doom. (Image 4) While the script itself may not merit the comparisons between Teddy’s loss of Dolores and the loss of lives in concentration camps, Scorsese’s images are nonetheless accomplished visual storytelling. And several shots create several layers of association at once, as in the image of the showerhead: it reminds the viewer of the fright felt during the shower scene of Psycho, but also of the death showers in concentration camps. 

Scorsese also mimics Kubrick by using existing music to fill his score, an eclectic mix that ranges from orchestrated fog horns to Brian Eno to 1950s crooners like Johnny Ray. His choices don’t match the intensity of the action for most scenes though, and rather than enhance the story the music is sometimes distracting.

The editing was also mixed. Shutter Island suffers, like most recent Scorsese films, from major continuity errors. When Teddy interviews Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley) in his cell, we cut between takes when Noyce’s hand is resting on his head, to at his side, and back and forth almost ten times. This is a sloppy error in an otherwise highly polished film, and separate from the intentional continuity breaks of the dream sequences. However, the stylized editing of the dream sequences more than makes up the other errors, and I suspect Scorsese may have been more excited about making a genre film that allowed such surreal touches than the actual substance of Shutter Island.

The locations gives the atmosphere the novel lacked. Shutter Island seems a dangerous place, full of echoing drips in warehouse-sized empty halls, pockets of suspiciously lush accommodation in the doctor’s quarters, bleak and barbaric wards that make the dungeons of The Silence of the Lambs look hospitable, and steep black cliffs swarming with rats overlooking crashing waves. Add a hurricane and it’s not a place anyone would want to visit.

The main reason to see Shutter Island is that Martin Scorsese directed it. Although it may not be the place to start in the director’s chronology, for fans of America’s greatest living director, every Scorsese film is a must-see.