"It's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls"

Rating: 9/10 (23 March 2010)

Most psychological thrillers of late, stylistically, have been somewhat cold and clinical – I'm thinking along the lines of Nolan's 'Memento (2000)' and Anderson's 'The Machinist (2004).' The last thriller I can recall with a dazzling colour palette was David Fincher's 'Se7en (1995).' Yet, compared to this film, 'Shutter Island (2010)' has an incredible gracefulness about it. Martin Scorsese has spoken many times of his love for Powell and Pressburger (particularly 'The Red Shoes (1948)'), and this film seems like a very deliberate, and worthy, attempt to mimic the lush visual style of Jack Cardiff's unforgettable Technicolor cinematography. There's a potential problem in painting a thriller film with such warm, inviting colours; the viewer is embraced, rather than repelled, by what he sees. This, however, is exactly what 'Shutter Island' aims for. The audience is thrust into the mind of Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his perception of the world becomes our reality.
Teddy Daniels is a Federal Marshall sent to an isolated Alcatraz-like penitentiary to investigate the disappearance of a female prisoner/mental patient. While battling personal demons of his own, Teddy must get to the bottom of an impossible mystery, all the while faced with hostility from the island authorities. A friend of mine noted that Scorsese was probably inspired by 'The Shining (1980),' and one might cite the use of György Ligeti (one of Kubrick's composers of choice) as evidence for this. However, 'The Shining' was, stylistically, a cold and sterile film, John Alcott's cinematography eerily detached from the horrors perpetrated in the Overlook Hotel. No, Scorsese's primary inspiration was The Archers, and his use of lush, brooding colours and lighting is unforgettably atmospheric {perhaps the closest same-genre reference-point would be Roger Corman's Technicolor Poe adaptations, such as 'The Masque of the Red Death (1964)'}.
Unfortunately, thanks to the inherent dangers of trawling the internet, I entered the film already aware of its ending. In any case, Scorsese seems uninterested in orchestrating the typical "gotcha!" narrative twist that is common to the genre. Even from the outset, the disturbance of the leading character is evident, the viewer frequently a party to his painful delusions. For most of the film's running time, we are quite happy to go along with Teddy, willing to believe his conspiracy theories. We expect to be deceived by the supporting characters, and resolve to see through their deceptions. Then something happens: the film tells us that we've been wrong, and we switch paths. All of a sudden, as he sat thoughtfully on the steps, I felt oddly distant from Teddy Daniels, his previously well-founded theories now dismissed as the musings of a mad-man. Are we, the audience, really that easy to sway? Have we just betrayed a perfectly sane man?