A B-movie plot with ambitious themes

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2010)

The less you know about Martin Scorsese's latest, the better. The film opens in bright white light, which is gradually faded to reveal Leonardo DiCaprio's character, a senior investigator from a US Government agency, suffering seasickness on a ferry crossing. He is en route to the eponymous Shutter Island, to assist with efforts to find an escapee from the island's prison-cum-hospital; a facility that is home to some of the most notorious mentally deranged criminals of 1950s America.
Immediately, we are hooked. The car journey from the ferry to the facility is filled with foreboding and intrigue, melding eerie sound textures with dark, bleak images of the unwelcoming island. Once we arrive, the curious behaviour of the accompanying police officers and the local staff, in addition to the more understandable actions of the patients/prisoners, further builds suspense, paying homage to classic Hitchcock techniques.
The most impressive achievement is that the storyline is consistently riveting for a running time in excess of two hours, seemingly without a single wasted scene, shot or line of dialogue as the plot unfolds in lavish, cinematic scale. DiCaprio's mature and compelling performance, in a character not too dissimilar to his undercover police officer in The Departed, is complemented perfectly by Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo and the wealth of heavyweight acting talents playing minor characters. A couple of minor plot contrivances aside, this is a robust and stimulating addition to Scorsese's canon; albeit one that it is unlikely to reach the same high plateau of critical acclaim as much of the director's preceding efforts.
The film is based on a novel by the increasingly impressive Dennis Lehane, whose Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone were also translated for the cinema, and who was also a writer for The Wire. The themes and settings of Shutter Island represent a diversion of sorts, but it transcends the B-movie genre in the same way as the TV/movie adaptations of his other writings were much more than just crime stories.