Shutter Island (2010)

"Not since "Raging Bull" has Mr. Scorsese so brazenly married brutality to beauty. Not since "Kundun" has one of his films felt so aspirational.  John Anderson, Wall Street Journal
"DiCaprio, in his most haunting and emotionally complex performance yet...  Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
"...a vivid, waking nightmare.  Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club

Editor's Note Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for a fourth time for this adaptation of SHUTTER ISLAND, a novel by Dennis LeHane (MYSTIC RIVER). The film opens in 1954 as World War II veteran and current federal marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), ferry to Shutter Island, a water-bound mental hospital housing the criminally insane. They have been asked to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient admitted to the asylum after she murdered her three children. As Teddy quizzes Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the head of the institution, he begins to suspect that the authorities in charge might not be giving him the whole truth, and that a terrible fate may befall all the patients in spooky Ward C -- a unit devoted to the most heinous of the hospital's inmates. Complicating matters further, Teddy has a secret of his own -- the arsonist who murdered his wife is incarcerated on Shutter Island. Driven to confront his wife's killer, and stranded on the island because of a hurricane, Teddy must unravel the secrets of the eerie place before succumbing to his own madness. Max von Sydow, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, and Jackie Earle Haley round out the supporting cast.

	Jackie Earle Haley
	Max Von Sydow
	Emily Mortimer
	Patricia Clarkson
	Ben Kingsley
	Mark Ruffalo
	Leonardo DiCaprio
	Michelle Williams
	Mike Medavoy - Producer
	Arnold Messer - Producer
	Bradley J. Fischer - Producer
	Martin Scorsese - Producer
	Chris Brigham - Executive Producer
	Laeta Kalogridis - Executive Producer
	Dennis Lehane - Executive Producer
	Gianni Nunnari - Executive Producer
	Louis Phillips - Executive Producer
	Robert Richardson - Director of Photography
	Robbie Robertson - Composer
	Thelma Schoonmaker - Editor
	Dennis Lehane - Source Writer
	Laeta Kalogridis - Screenwriter
	Martin Scorsese - Director

Chicago Sun-Times
3.5 stars out of 4 -- "Scorsese the craftsman chips away at reality piece by piece....There are thrilling visuals in SHUTTER ISLAND..." 02/17/2010

Box Office
3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[A]s a period piece set in the mid 1950s, a time of major shifts in the treatment and diagnosis of mental illness, the film situates itself in the realities of the era's cinema..." 02/17/2010

USA Today
"It's technically masterful, as only a film by visionary director Martin Scorsese can be....The production design by Dante Ferretti is impeccable." 02/19/2010

A.V. Club
"[The story] morphs into full-on psychological horror....Scorsese renders his hero's nightmares in vivid Technicolor flashbacks and dream sequences that insistently bleed into reality..." -- Grade: A- 02/18/2010

Variety
"Kingsley and von Sydow bring their smooth confidence to bear on their roles as institution big shots, while Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson score in their individual big scenes." 02/13/2010

Wall Street Journal
"SHUTTER ISLAND is the cinematic equivalent of a Joseph Cornell box, a world of appropriated ingredients given new meaning through their combination and juxtaposition." 02/19/2010

Los Angeles Times
"In SHUTTER ISLAND, director Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition..." 02/19/2010

Hollywood Reporter
"SHUTTER ISLAND is a remarkable high-wire act, performed without a net and exploiting all the accumulated skills of a consummate artist. It dazzles and provokes." 02/13/2010

Movieline
"A post-traumatic allegory whose potency is only deepened by it final turn of the screw, SHUTTER ISLAND is most successful in manifesting physically the condition of emotional chaos and mental fracture." 02/17/2010

Entertainment Weekly
"The movie does have a pay-off....And it works, shiveringly well." -- Grade: B 02/26/2010

Rolling Stone
3.5 stars out of 4 -- "DiCaprio, in his most haunting and emotionally complex performance yet, is the vessel Scorsese uses to lead us through the film's labyrinth." 02/18/2010

Total Film
4 stars out of 5 -- "[A]n impeccably assembled genre thriller from Martin Scorsese that lets the Oscar-winning filmmaker pay painstaking homage to the Hollywood film noirs of the '40s and '50s." 02/12/2010

Empire
4 stars out of 5 -- "SHUTTER ISLAND offers sumptuous, enthralling, shivery gothic filmmaking with a hardboiled heart and a sly line in asylum humour." 03/19/2010

Premiere
3 stars out of 4 -- "A taut and stylish thriller with a twist ending that might surprise some....Martin Scorsese takes time away from crafting epics to make this fun and spooky thriller in the vein of CAPE FEAR..." 06/07/2010

ReelViews 7 of 10
Although every effort has been made to limit the revelations in this review, it's difficult to provide a coherent discussion of Shutter Island without giving away something, so readers are hereby placed on alert. If you're familiar with the book, however, there's no reason to stop here?What's wrong with Shutter Island? This has been the question ever since Paramount Pictures elected to move the Martin Scorsese-directed thriller from its comfortable pre-Oscar position to the wastelands of February. It turns out that there's nothing wrong with Shutter Island - except perhaps that it's not Oscar worthy material. An atmospheric mind-f**k of a thriller, this movie delights in playing games with the audience's perceptions and has been crafted with such competence that it rises above the somewhat generic storyline that forms the basis of Dennis Lehane's novel. The strength of the film, like the book, is that it never allows the viewer to feel comfortable with what he is watching. That's because Shutter Island is presented from the perspective of an unreliable narrator and, as such, the lines between fantasy and reality sometimes blur so strongly that it's easy to become unanchored in trying to distinguish between what's real and what isn't. A case can be made that the movie is so enamored with this aspect of its approach that it fails to connect on an emotional level. Shutter Island addresses some powerful, disturbing concepts but, despite effective performances by the leads, the movie's psychological impact is minimal. It doesn't pack the powerhouse punch one has come to expect from Scorsese. Still, the director's consummate skill has lifted what might otherwise be a middling endeavor into something compellingly watchable. It's another Cape Fear...Shutter Island is satisfying in ways that February movies often are not. Like all solid thrillers, it engages while challenging the intellect. Its puzzle, while not as twisty as some, is nevertheless enticing to piece together. Yet it's easy to understand Paramount's reluctance to release the movie in the thick of the Oscar season because it's not really an awards-caliber movie. Shutter Island is enjoyable in part because of the way Scorsese approaches the material, but it is ultimately nothing more than a well-made genre effort. Relieved of the weight of Oscar expectations, perhaps Shutter Island will open up to audiences who view Scorsese as being too "artistic." After all, this production is many things, but pretentious is not among them. - James Berardinelli

Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
Shutter Island starts working on us with the first musical notes under the Paramount logo's mountain, even before the film starts. They're ominous and doomy. So is the film. This is Martin Scorsese's evocation of the delicious shuddering fear we feel when horror movies are about something and don't release all the tension with action scenes...In its own way it's a haunted house movie, or make that a haunted castle or fortress. Shutter Island, we're told, is a remote and craggy island off Boston, where a Civil War-era fort has been adapted as a prison for the criminally insane. We approach it by boat through lowering skies, and the feeling is something like the approach to King Kong's island: Looming in gloom from the sea, it fills the visitor with dread. To this island travel U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo)...You may read reviews of Shutter Island complaining that the ending blindsides you. The uncertainty it causes prevents the film from feeling perfect on first viewing. I have a feeling it might improve on second. Some may believe it doesn't make sense. Or that, if it does, then the movie leading up to it doesn't. I asked myself: OK, then, how should it end? What would be more satisfactory? Why can't I be one of those critics who informs the director what he should have done instead?...Oh, I've had moments like that. Every moviegoer does. But not with Shutter Island. This movie is all of a piece, even the parts that don't appear to fit. There is a human tendency to note carefully what goes before, and draw logical conclusions. But -- what if you can't nail down exactly what went before? What if there were things about Cawley and his peculiar staff that were hidden? What if the movie lacks a reliable narrator? What if its point of view isn't omniscient but fragmented? Where can it all lead? What does it mean? We ask, and Teddy asks, too. - Roger Ebert