Great little mind warp of a movie

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2010)

I'm gonna try to write a completely spoiler-free review of "Shutter Island". Movies like this absolutely demand that you do NOT know what's coming next, and I really hope folks don't read spoiler reviews before seeing SI.
Let me start by saying this is NOT a horror movie, contrary to what the trailers suggest. This is Martin Scorcese's take on the Hitchcock suspense thriller, and a thumpin' good one. It follows a lot of Hitchcockian beats: unsettling beginning, that feeling something isn't quite right, with enough action sequences to keep you distracted from what's REALLY going on. Hitch would be a fan of this movie.
Let me also say that Leo DiCaprio does some really good acting here. He plays a U.S. Marshall dispatched to an insane asylum to track an escaped prisoner. He ends up wrapped in the madness himself, trying to separate madness from reality, conspiracy from banality, truth from fiction. DiCaprio is incredibly convincing even when you're not convinced what you're seeing is real.
The supporting cast is quite stellar: Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Jackie Earle Haley, and that master-of-the-creep Max von Sydow. There's even a surprisingly gruesome cameo by ... well, that would be spoiling :-). Now sometimes their acting is flat & unconvincing, or is that exactly the effect Scorcese wants?? Hmmmmm.....
I have to throw in some kudos to the location scouts and set designers. Shutter Island itself is wholly part of the cast and crucial to the success of the film. How they managed to find this place ... incredible score on their part! So now for the negatives, the reasons I don't give this a full 10. The script does have a couple of plot holes, but because the theme is "truth or madness", they're mostly forgivable. There's also a definite sense that you've seen this story before (this is not "Memento", a film that was truly unique). And they did struggle a bit at the end (honestly, I don't know if there COULD be a wholly satisfying end for the story). But even this is forgivable, because films like this are DEFINITELY about the journey, not the destination.
8 out of 10.