The horror

Rating: 8/10 (7 February 2019)

Shutter Island made me look up the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. What a dive into insanity that was. In the film, it is supposed to explain Ted's PTSD. But in reality, it is there to remind us that insanity is in everyone. The SS that killed all those people and let them rot right next to them, living with decaying corpses and just waiting for the Americans.. And the soldiers who snapped and executed them. After reading about all that, I was so upset I couldn't go on watching the film.
So I got back to it on a different time. This was a good film. Contrary to what a lot of commentators seem to regret, this was not designed as a cheap thrills movie with a forced twist plot that was supposed to catch us unaware. Ten minutes in, we do begin to suspect Teddy is, in fact, a patient. So what. I mean, that was not the point, people. Ted (or Andrew) was a good man, a war hero, an all American golden boy who got traumatized so bad in the war that he lost it; he started drinking, neglected his wife and refused to see she needed help, thus exposing his kids to inevitable danger. I can totally see why a psychiatrist with progressive ideas would go to great lengths to try and help this kind of man. A good man fighting his self imposed delusions. Whether this whole charade could have helped, I have no idea - I am no psychiatrist. However, I find it incredible that so many commentators would actually prefer to see a film in which Ted's delusions would be true: the Nazi psychiatrist conducting experiments on criminally insane prisoners held in Bedlam-like conditions in a weird fortress on a cut-off island. Not to mention those who flaunt their knowledge of German expressionism by acting offended because The cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a silent film from 1920, also had this idea of a delusional young mental patient. That film is excellent, the twist plot is amazing if you think it was done a hundred years ago, but Shutter Island is simply not about that. This is a film on trauma.