Rewatchable masterpiece with fantastic ending and buckets of style

Rating: 10/10 (9 May 2019)

Martin Scorsese is already a directing legend. I think 50 years from now, this film will rightfully be regarded as one of his best.
It honestly perplexes me that Shutter Island has had mixed reviews since it's release. I don't usually take jabs at reviewers since I try to respect everyone's opinion...but frankly in this case a lot of the "professional critics" that panned it come across as plain ignorant in their commentary.
One national media outlet simply said the film is "weird", had some kind of hissy fit over the dead kids shown in the Holocaust scenes and then gave it a bad score. It's a psychological drama, and you don't expect it to be "weird"? And you can't see the obvious thematic parallel between the Holocaust scenes and a character's personal tragedies? Jesus wept.
I digress. The film itself is about US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) exploring an offshore mental institution, the eponymous Shutter Island.
The two agents are there to uncover a sinister conspiracy lead by the intelligent and oddly intimidating Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and I will say no more lest I ruin the movie.
The film contains a brilliant ending in which one sentence delivered masterfully by DiCaprio changes practically the entire meaning of the story.
Kingsley is at his peak playing a character full of both empathy and menace. Finally, Scorsese does a wonderful job with his direction, playing constantly with deliberate continuity errors and other such visual oddities in order to wring a potent atmosphere of confusion and delirium from the very first shot of the film.
It's a 10/10 for me, since I cannot think of any rightful criticism of this great psychological character drama. Wonderful film-making.