Decent thriller, surprisingly polarizing

Rating: 6/10 (4 April 2010)

I was very surprised to find this film was either loved or hated by most reviewers. Of course, it tends to be an inherent quality of publicly posted comments that people with strong opinions will be the ones who will bother to post, but still... I thought the film was a decent and well-made one. Predictable - yes. Over the top acting - come on, it's Marty! Too long - again, Marty. However, I must insist that the predictability of the ending was rather a strength of the film: If one were to follow the "conspiracy/detective" plot through 2 hours, it's logical that the ending will disappoint - but that's your problem, dear viewer! Not only is the insanity plot much more interesting, the film becomes much more interesting once you watch it from this premise. For example, the warden who drives Teddy back from the cliffs, who isn't buying into the doctors' tactics and gives him the "you're dangerous and violent" comments: great scene, but merely weird if you haven't suspected the context. Flaws: The score was horrible. Horrible. Destroyed many scenes, and I'm so glad Marty toned it down toward the end. The dead children scenes were redundant and extremely overused; then again, Marty always does that with his favorite "symbols": rubbing it in, again and again. Some of the dialogue could have been much better written, but it's a mainstream movie after all. One last note on the history of psychiatry: the struggle between psychosurgery and modern psychiatry devoted to the phenomenology of the patient's narrative - that is a true fact, and it did begin in the fifties. Furthermore, going along with a patient's delusion at crtain points of the therapeutic process: I'm appalled that many reviewers found this so absurd. I'm a psychiatrist and it's my line of work. Granted, the film is an exaggerated version of that, but it's fiction after all.