Odd little Cast Away-Invasion of the Body Snatchers mash up which works a lot better than it has any right to.

Rating: 7/10 (29 February 2012)

Is Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island a police procedural thriller? A horror movie? Is it a film about someone offered the chance to this time uncover (and thus save) those being held against their will by an exterior force seemingly ungoverned by the rest of a broader representation of a community? Well, yes and no and then yes again and then no and then........well, to go on would be to reveal too much. Rest assured, the film is deceptively simplistic but at the same time non-cryptically complicated – or should that be deceptively complicated and non-cryptically simplistic? It is a film about a lead plunged into a situation that sees him with the capability to help a batch of helpless people trapped on the titular Shutter Island who're falling victim to all manner of sordidness, this at a time when recent demons of having stumbled across a Nazi concentration camp long after it was too late to do anything still resonate. At least, for the most part it is a film about this – irregardless of the bumpy, rickety road full of holes and lumps Scorsese takes us down, Shutter Island suffices as a piece of drama you're be hard pressed not to recommend.
The film follows a Bostonian man named Teddy Daniels, played with an impeccably balanced amount of remorse; fear and anger throughout by that of Leonardo Di Caprio. Daniels is a U.S. Marshall, and is assigned to the titular Shutter Island located off the coast of off Boston Harbor. The island is a place not unfamiliar to grey weather and storms, although rather more so to people stepping off its lone mode of transportation both to and from it in the form of ferry and onto its ground by those who think they can come along and boss about the individuals running it. Daniels is one of these people; a man there to look for someone based on the island who rather recently simply disappeared overnight, but not there to take orders from Ben Kingsley's chief doctor in residence, John Cawley. The two men and their antagonism is apparent from the beginning: where Cawley gives a brief outline of the sorts of people he has on this island of containment and rehabilitation, he is quick to label them "patients" present to be cured, with Daniels equally quick to counteract with his view that they are "prisoners" omnipresent so as to be punished for crimes.
Daniels nurses some painful events from his past, namely that of that aforementioned wartime discovery of a German concentration camp and the fact that he recently lost his wife. Daniels is there with a fresh face in U.S. Marshalling: that of Mark Ruffalo's Chuck Aule; a guy who verbally establishes Daniels' reputation as a guy to be reckoned with in this career field as they chug on over through the mist and mire to the island. Initial clashings between the somewhat gruff and more carefree investigative duo of Aule and Daniels and that of Cawley and his German psychiatrist Jeremiah Naehring (von Sydow) escalate beyond mere face value; appearance and the nature of how it is they carry out their investigative work: getting out and about searching for clues consequently lined up alongside that of using studies in psychology to uncover truths about people and past situations "prisoners" or "patients" were dramatically involved in.
Daniels begins to suspect the powers that be on the island are holding back on information, and he launches a crusade going against all the location's rules to try and figure out a bigger picture he believes is at foot – something which intensifies when the person shows up anyway and the film tries to tap into the paranoia and fear rife throughout the respective era in America born out of U.F.O. cover-up conspiracies and Communism infiltration fears. Like his 1976 film Taxi Driver, Scorsese is more than apt at distilling the reality of a lead's world through his own broken subconscious; that is to say, constructing a view of a place (or person, as was evident in The King of Comedy) so intensified that we are propelled into seeing the same object in the same fashion as we're launched into this lead's life and mind. There is about enough substance to keep this 2010 effort grounded throughout, the deft touches implemented during the course of the film allowing a continuous flow of cause, effect and reveal which adds to a burning sense of horror and things seemingly become clearer.
Without Scorsese's deft hand, the film may very well have broken down into farce long before the end credits and one fantastic example of his ability to just move and weave things along is evident when one of the island's chief wardens picks the lead up whilst he was out and about by himself in the forests of the locale following a string of 'reveals' which apparently tell of a greater, darker secret the place holds. Upon picking him up, we are suddenly aware of just how akin to a Nazi Gestapo uniform this warden's clothing actually looks and we think back to if it had always looked like that or whether the film is just toying with us in the immediate present. The film is not the great character study, nor extended piece of narrative film-making, that pieces like 1995's Casino or 1980's Raging Bull were; films playing out across this exasperated amount of time as tensions and distrust boil over between people we never particularly liked. Moreover, it is a genre piece feeding off twists and turns which we accept in a film made by someone we do not feel uneasy in the hand of – the likes of which need not be avoided.