A little help

Rating: 4/10 (21 February 2010)

It wasn't a fair movie. Teddy's reality was absolutely unambiguous until the very end. We saw him hallucinating even when he didn't: when the "doctor" wakes him up in the cave. That's cheating. If you're going to twist the end completely around, there has to be some clue. You can bury it and hope the viewers miss it, but there should be a clue that the narrator is unreliable. Like in the 6th Sense. You go back through the 6th Sense and notice that it's never inconsistent; no one but the boy ever speaks to the lead character; there's no overlap. If you're clever enough, you can guess the end. Shutter Island offers no clues and it's not consistent, so that the end comes out of left field, and that's not fair.
There is no movie rule that says thrillers must be fair and there have to be clues, but there is no viewer rule, either, that says I can't prefer them that way.