A blur of something that is very grey and very loud.

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2010)

Scorsese seems like he had his mind in other projects while he was making this. Like he was saying, I am gone now but I've left my will working here so I can leave you here to watch this while I make something I really care about. The movie opens all guns blazing, all pomp and fury and circumstance, the pace is act 2 from the first couple of minutes, then we stop to find out the key trauma that haunts Ted Daniels and it's all furious clamor and loud "ominous music" again, helicopter shots and dream scenes and slabs of plot thrown at you like we need to get things out of the way fast.
From there Shutter Island segues into a convenient "mystery thriller" pattern, the kind of which the detective stoops down to produce important clues from under a tile in the floor which will invariably attain their proper meaning in key moments, where things are not what they really seem, the authorities responsible for helping out with the investigation are really trying to sidetrack it and crazed inmates anxiously scribble "RUN" on Daniels' notepad. The two detectives arrive at Shutter Island to solve a mystery much like Sergeant Howie does in The Wicker Man and Sean Connery's medieval Sherlock Holmes does in The Name of the Rose, except the shapelessness of something's not quite right here is not allowed to first become a faint outline before it becomes a definite shape. Shutter Island lunges forward, kicking and screaming and thrashing in the mist, it's all cut cut cut and plot plot plot, it doesn't stop to whisper anything, it hollers and cackles and carpet bombs its ominous scenes with "ominous music" so that we're never in the dark about what we're supposed to be feeling.
At some point Daniels loses himself inside the maze of Ward C and a warden, like the crazy old fool in a slasher movie come out of the woods to warn promiscuous teens of a strange prophecy, conveniently shows up to tell him that all the inmates are running loose and this is another thing Shutter Island does wrong. It shouts exposition to the back of the house. The only instance it kind of comes on its own is near the end, where Daniels' situation becomes wonderfully ambiguous in a "is he crazy or is he not?" way, except even that is followed by a long flashback meant to erase every trace of that ambiguity and the movie collapses on its knees and shouts "nooo!!".
There's a good movie kept locked in a cell somewhere in the basement, yet Scorsese seems hellbent to keep the audience from finding her probably because he has not only run off with the key and left her there, he has also lost the key so that he needs to change her name to keep us from finding it, and now when we find her at last, when we find out that *TWIST TWIST TWIST*, there's not even musing astonishment to be had. The premise is clever but a lot of the handling is lurid because for most of its duration the movie is not really asking itself "what's eating Ted Daniels?" but "woo!! nazi experiments in the mysterious lighthouse".
I saw this the same day I saw Chan-wook Park's Thirst and that movie still haunts my mind in the way Shutter Island is designed to, while Shutter Island is already beginning to fade and blur into something that is very grey and very loud.