You saw the trailer, you know what it's like...

Rating: 6/10 (1 March 2010)

A guilty pleasure to be sure, but worth genuine kudos for attempting and succeeding in lurid B-movie, drive-in fashion the almost-always baroque tale (in movies at least) told by an unreliable narrator. The movie offers strong acting, especially from De Caprio, but little else in the way of real production pleasures. Music, production design and Scorsese's look-at- me camera work are all over the top.
The story unfolds in clue-dropping fashion, and it's our job to figure the silly thing out. Major twists may be discerned but the nasty details are fun to guess at too, and harder to perceive. And there's always the very last twist to speculate about. Here it proves a good one. Again, you've seen the trailer, you know not to expect a serious take on cops looking for a missing mental inmate; you're expecting a gumbo of noir, horror and thriller. The 1950s setting takes us immediately into the Snake Pit world of lobotomies and Freudian-drenched dreams and situations – it's surprising Faulknerian castration scenarios don't appear – and signal us to have some fun. Despite the noise and histrionics, you can. A better storyteller than Scorsese would have realized the story is really the dead wife's: how did she manage to go so crazy and do what she did? She didn't see the horrors of Dachau. And Scorsese might have added some comic relief, graced us with a real score, and been able to tell the tale in a more efficient, horror-thriller manner (the jump scares are laughably bad). But the story's a Grand Guignol take on a mental breakdown: subtlety is not an option. Eat your popcorn, laugh at the thing for being so atavistically earnest and play along.