Blog 4: Shutter Island

Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese, and based off of Dennis Lehane's book, is about two U.S. Marshals, Teddy Daniels, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Chuck Aule, played by Mark Ruffalo, whom are called to a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate a mysterious disappearance of a murderous patient of the island's fortress-like hospital for the criminally insane. Just like the security officer of the island says,"We take only the most dangerous, damaged patients. Ones no other hospital can manage."

Now, this may sound like your typical investigation movie, but it is far from that. I was skeptical about seeing it at first, but I was quickly reassured not too far into the movie.

The movie takes place in Holocaust times, and now U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, and his new partner, Chuck Aule, are trying to figure out where a missing murderous "patient" has vanished to. The hospital's suspicious doctors, played by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydo, are not much help. Turns out, the missing patient becomes beside the point as Teddy's increasingly unsteady state of mind takes center stage. Teddy reveals that the man who set the fire that killed his wife, Delores, is a patient at that hospital and is hell-bent on finding him too.

Teddy has a lot of flashbacks to the time he spent in WWII during the Dachau liberation as a U.S. Soldier, and depicts many disturbing images of dead bodies piled outside of boxcars and the killings of the S.S. Officers that he participated in. He also has many dreams, and daydreams, about his dead wife. One of the first dreams he has is from the very first night he spent at the hospital where, in his dream, he is holding his wife and she leaks water from her stomach and that turns to blood, then her whole body turns to ash. Delores plays a pretty large role in the movie as Teddy's sanity slowly goes down-hill and he begins to see more of her in his time on the island. She is a ghostly figure, usually in the background of Teddy's scenes, and she talks to him and he talks back. A "walking nightmare," if you must.

As the movie progresses, Teddy ends up finding some interesting, and possibly deadly, information about the institution and what exactly they do there. As Teddy talks to an inmate shackled in the forbidden Ward C, he finds out he just might be a mouse, trapped in a maze on the island, and there might not be a way out for him.

The second hour of the movie contains a marathon of explanations that wind up getting pretty confusing, I must say. But in the end, everything makes sense and that is what makes the movie so great. Even with the wicked, yet almost predictable, twist of an ending. The details of this movie are difficult to explain because so much goes on in the storyline. It is almost impossible to explain much of it without giving everything away. So, I apologize if everything is a little fuzzy.

Now, I do not want to give away the ending because I think this is a must see movie for all peoples 17 years of age and older, because it is rated R for disturbing violent content, language, and some nudity; although I do not recall anything of the latter. I absolutely loved this movie and simply cannot wait to own it.