A masterpiece that will be missed

Rating: 4/10 (22 April 2011)

This review explains some elements of the plot and also suggests possible improvements that could have saved the story from stopping halfway from the ballpark.
One thing is certain: the producers should NOT have entrusted this film to Martin Scorcese. This story could have been given a much better treatment in the crafty hands of Polanski, or Fincher, or, better still, Cronenberg. A film director who's only leading actor's name is Leonardo should be given a desk job instead.
About 70% of all the promise and potential in this story was, sadly, wasted. To begin with, the screenplay itself was raw and unpolished. Let's face it: there are way too many things in it that are somewhat announced but never really delivered. I'll explain what I mean, but beware of the SPOILERS GALORE!
Okay, a former FBI marshall becomes mentally unstable and is undergoing a treatment in a severely guarded clinical facility. A year into it the doctors decide to give him the last chance (before subjecting to lobotomy) and play out what's called in psychiatry 'psychodrama': you put a patient in hypnosis, program him to believe in a certain set of circumstances, and then deliberately lead him to the 'crisis' - final realization of his folly and the error of his ways.
The young protagonist Edward and his sidekick arrive to a severely guarded island to investigate the disappearance of one of the inmates. We are soon given glimpses into Teddy's past traumas and start to suspect that something's not right with him. At the same time the story suggests that something's not right with the facility as well: the rumors of violent experiments conducted on the inmates, the strange attitude of both doctors and police wardens etc. Somewhere 5 minutes into the film I got the feeling that the hero looks like he belongs there, because he is clearly delusional, just like the rest of the crowd there.
This is where the dream sequences come in, and they, I should say, are the most skillfully crafted element in the whole film. The movie speaks in Jungian symbolism here, inviting us to play a game of deciphering the meaning of the messages from the depth. We can clearly perceive the juxtaposition of the two elements: fire and water. The hero dreams of fire destroying his past love, only to be awakened by ever increasing showers of water bringing him back to brutal reality.
Although you are constantly haunted by the feeling that all of this somehow doesn't seem real altogether, if you learn to understand the language of the symbolic elements (mainly water and fire), the story becomes largely transparent. Edward suffers from a severe psychic trauma after his wife, being prone to bouts of schizophrenia, murdered their three children by drowning them in the pond. Upon discovery of this morbid predicament Teddy impulsively shoots his wife dead. The whole thing is too painful for him to live with, so he represses the whole episode deep into subconscious (classic Freud here) and creates a fictional memory instead, where his wife fell victim to arson and perished in a fire along with their apartment. "She died." - he explains to his sidekick. - "Not from fire - from smoke. That is important."
When interrogating the inmates Teddy is constantly asking them about a certain Laeddis. It turns out the guy was responsible for the arson. "He lit the match that destroyed her." We find that this person was Edward's own invention to relay the guilt of his wife's death. Since Edward blames 'Laeddis' - his alter ego - for the whole disaster, he obviously had thought he had somehow provoked\triggered his wife's insanity (although we are never really told how; we can only speculate that it was his excessive drinking which led to distancing away from her and thus pushing her mind to the edge.) In his search for 'Laeddis' he's actually looking for himself.
Edward finds the missing patient (Rachel) in a cave by the fire. During their entire conversation we see flames, which is clearly to tell us that Edward is again hallucinating and Rachel is in fact a figment of his imagination.
The film never fully uses its premise to the possible end: all the psychodrama so thoroughly played out by doctors and staff ends abruptly in the lighthouse scene (another Jungian symbol) where doctor simply TELLS Edward the truth (which is not something he should do, literature- wise and psychiatry-wise). The whole scene felt so out of place, as if the film crew were running out of time so instead of developing the story further they simply decided to quickly TELL the viewer the rest of it.
This is a shame really, because the story COULD have gone in a number of promising directions (for which all the premise was set): 1) play out the Warden character as a proper antagonist (immoral brute who is effectively questioning Edward's moral stance) 2) play out the love romance with either one of the female inmates, or even with fictional Rachel, which would help to reveal Edward's character flaw (that had helped instigate his wife's insanity) and possibly overcome it. Yes, there WAS a way to redeem Edward should have been MORE flashback scenes, and simply put MORE ROMANCE in the film in order to save the story.