A weary but gratifying experiment.

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2012)

Shutter Island exemplifies Martin Scorsese's wonderful intelligence and illuminations of motion picture art as an performer and now director. The mystery behind the fogginess suggests a bleak elude eeriness with this film, revealing an unexpected yet incredible finale. The camera also adopts feelings of apprehension, giving it a frantic feel and a true crime investigatory mind set. In addition, we see how DiCaprio's acting capabilities have become more convincing and have improved through age since his heroics in Titanic. This is potentially one of Scorsese's most experimental pieces of film making. His delicate perception of how sound and camera movement blend quite beautifully to create significant meanings and tempers, covering the picture with a blanket of vagueness and trepidation.
Set in 1954, U.S. Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) embarks on an investigation into the mysterious disappearance of a patient by the name Rachel Solando, who has escaped or been potentially slaughtered at an asylum institute for the criminally insane. As Teddy tip-toes around the derelict Island he discovers more than he would have wished for, including a few home truths that reveal themes of true identity and false recognition of the enemy. Teddy's character recognition and re-acknowledgment of haunting images from his time serving during the Second World War, with visionaries of his army unit releasing free a Nazi concentration camp and the death of his wife and two children truly capture the emotion that Scorsese, Kalogridis and Lehane attempt to reveal to the narratives admirers. He begins to have reservations with his own memory, his wife and even his personal wisdom due the experience of radical experiments put in order by the mental institute, causing confusion and a host of suspects. As Terry and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) find themselves marooned on the island, Teddy begins interrogating the internees, finding a haunting and unexpected hidden secret relating to Shutter Island.
DiCaprio's notions of confusion, conspiracy and misplaced sense of direction really give his character an incredible unbalanced movement, especially considering when detectives are supposed to steer from paranoia. Although his temperament is full of perplexity, Teddy fails to realise he has become the mechanism of a psychological experiment. This truly illustrates DiCaprio's maturity as a performer, feeding upon Scorsese's filming intelligence, congratulating the late 1960s psychological terror era on influence on tails such as this.