A scary and compelling movie...

Rating: 9/10 (13 December 2015)

95In this movie we are in the year 1954 a couple of years after the world war. "Shutter Island" begins with the main protagonist standing on a boat on his way to an island "Shutter island" on this island there is a hospital for mental ill people. He gets send there, not because he is mental ill, but because there is an escaped patient. The protagonist is called Teddy Daniels and is a US Marshal, who is put on an seem like impossible task...
The movie is directed by Martin Scorsese. A man with a lot of movies on his name. He had previously made some movies with Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed, The Aviator...). He did a good job at directing this movie, and you could see that they have worked together in the way of DiCaprio's acting (a bit over him in the second alinea). The cinematography was nice too. It had some pretty shots in it (the last shot of the lighthouse). The cinematographer was Robert Richardson. The green screen wasn't the greatest. You could easily spot when they were using one. The colors used were quite nice to look at. When it was day time it all looked very colorful, but when it was night time it were sad and somber colors. The blood, when someone was killed, was very red, and I think they did this, to accentuate it, and that you would see it well. So it looked more dramatic. In the flashbacks or dream sequences they used another sort of color, the were brighter (in his dreams) and darker (in his flashbacks. Which brings me how interesting the flashbacks and dreams were, just as the hallucinations of his. The dreams were very well edited, and handled. The flashbacks were nicely shot and showed well how a damaged person Teddy was. The hallucinations were a mix of the flashbacks and dreams, with the characters who appeared in them meting. That is also a thing that I 'liked'. The contrast between his wife and the little girl. The girl died of freezing to death, and his wife burned to death. But what I think they handled the best was the portraying of the mental hospital. It looked scary, due to the good music and the honking boat noise. But also due to the acting of the patients and the make-up brought on thel (the slid neck make up of a woman working in the garden, or the scar across the face of Laeddis. But the editing throughout the movie was just OK, a lot of the times positions of the hands changed, and I wasn't even looking for this kind of mistakes.
The acting was just brilliant by everyone. Especially by Leonardo Dicaprio, he played the protagonist of this story, Teddy. He really showed at times how scared he was of reality (ending) and also how scarred he was during the entire movie. In the flashbacks you really got to know him. He had a very powerful scene in one of them, in which he puts away the gun of a nazi, so he can suffer from his deeds, instead of committing suicide. He was intimidating and scary himself. Mark Ruffalo was also very good, he played the partner of Teddy. In the beginning of the movie, I thought he was a made up character by Teddy. (Teddy couldn't find his cigarettes, and Ruffalo had cigarettes, He can't put of his holster, we see his body lying on the cliffs, which isn't there in reality...) Ben Kingsly was good as well, he played the boss of the mental hospital, his character wasn't so clear for me, and with this I mean that I could never figure out to trust him or not. The rest of the supporting cast was did a good job. But the wife of Teddy stood out to me. She was very scary, even horrifying at times, in the beginning she seems innocent, but that changes...
The script of the movie is written by Laeta Kalogridis. It was a well written script. The movie is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. I have read the book called 'The Drop' (this is also filmed with Tom Hardy). This book was written by Lehane, and I liked it, so I was just more excited to go see this movie. But now back to the script. There was some interesting dialogue, especially between Teddy and the woman in the cave, you were so interested to here what they were going to say next. Just one min in the script is that it is confusing at times. But it is also very compelling. I was trying to figure it out myself, which made the movie just more tense. The dialogue between George Noyce was good, and scary too the accentuated sound of the matches, and the whispering of the patients made it more scarier. The ending was not too bad, but also not amazing, you are left with a lot of questions, but this was the meaning of the writer.
Anyway I think this was a good movie and that is way it gets a 9.5/10 from me. I would recommend you watching it, if you like scary and tense full movies!