It's a review about how the psychological construction of the characters is genius and essential for the plot twist

Rating: 9/10 (4 December 2017)

Shutter Island and the teaching of how to do a Plot Twist
When I went to the cinema to watch Shutter Island, I wasn't expecting very much. To be sincere, I just decided to watch it because of Scorsese's and DiCaprio's fame. That's all: I was motivated to watch a good movie with a great plot. When the film ended, however, I remained sitting on my place for five minutes trying to understand what had happened. And it was amazing.
The film starts with the arrival of two sheriffs, Terry Daniels and Chuck Aule, in Shutter Island – in which a hospice is located – with a unique purpose: solve a mysterious case of a disappeared patient, Rachel Solando. It looks like the whole plot will revolve around this problem, but at some point, Terry starts to distrust the faithfulness of the hospice's principal, and then it becomes a totally different plot with a distinct mystery. Here is one of the biggest hits of Scorsese: there is an immersion in Terry's psychology, which is getting kind of crazy with his new discoveries. We can follow his drama while he goes through the island – and about it, I need to congratulate DiCaprio.
It is important to have in mind that, after the first day of the sheriffs in the island, the whole plot is guided by the psychological issues of the main character, and this process is so subtle that we can't know what exactly is happening on the island at all. At this point, we don't know if Terry is actually right about his distrust or if he is wrong and is getting crazy while a disappeared woman is roaming the island.
All Teddy's distrust starts to make some sense when Andrew Laeddis appears in the story. According to the marshal, he was guilty in the death of his wife, Dolores Chanal, and he was there at the hospice as a patient. After realizing that, Terry ignores his first function – finding Rachel Solando – and starts to go after clues that prove he's right. A scene that makes this clear for us is when Teddy and Chuck interrogate some patients and, in all interrogations, Teddy asks if the interviewee knows something about Andrew. After that, we can feel the paranoia that Teddy's mind is on. He's unique objective is to find out if the assassin of his wife is on the island.
The brilliance of the plot makes us travel with the main character on his problem, forgetting all about Rachel Solando and everything else; that is, we truly believe that Teddy is right and if he looks for it, he will find Andrew. Now alone, the marshal walks by the island towards the lighthouse. On the way he finds a cave where the plot changes again. There he finds a woman who affirms that she was a hospice's doctor, and her name is Rachel Solando. She explains that she was diagnosed crazy to be silenced, just because she was totally against the methods that were being used to treat the patients. After that, the only way out for Teddy is to unmask everything that the women in the cave told him. I would like to emphasize here how Scorsese got everything exactly as it is in the book that inspired him, which is Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane.
When Teddy enters in the lighthouse, the magic of the plot twist happens. He doesn't find any doctor making experiments with the patients; he just finds the principal, who starts to explain to him what was happening. As I said, the acting and the plot make us believe strongly that Teddy is right on his search. However, everything changes when we discover that the marshal was actually a patient on treatment and the plot was created by the doctors, who were trying to treat him alternatively. Even if we know it is true, we don't want to believe it because everything before it was built so perfectly that it immersed everybody in his psychological issues, and that's why this film is so amazing.