Reality is up for grabs throughout this convoluted adventure.

Rating: 8/10 (27 February 2010)

Gripping, but ultimately unsatisfying (unless you are sold out to Scorsese's textbook brand of existentialism), Shutter Island is a beautifully crafted film that vacillates between looming paranoia and self-loathing psychosis, never allowing the audience to actually become convinced of either situation.
The cast is perfectly wonderful at contributing to the atmosphere of dread and paranoia that surrounds the Island and its inhabitants. The banter between DiCapiro, von Sydow, and Kingsley is a knot worthy of a troop of Eagle Scouts. Is Teddy the hunter or the hunted? Are the administrators of Shutter Island the monsters, or is Teddy/Andrew the real monster, running from himself? A show is being staged for Teddy's benefit, but is it to cover up a monstrous secret about Shutter Island, or to force Teddy to face his own psychological demons? Is Delores a guide, or an enemy to his sanity? Is Chuck real, a delusion, or an enemy in disguise? The tension never lets up as the viewer is sent reeling from one enigmatic scene to the next. As more information is revealed, less and less is really understood with any degree of certainty. Until finally we are left tottering between believing that Teddy is either a self-deluded monster or a victim who is playing along with his captors to avoid destruction. His final choice to perish as a man of honor, rather than live as a monstrous psychotic makes objective reality irrelevant and human moral choice the only ultimate authentic reality.
While Shutter Island shows a brilliant filmmaker at the height of his craft, I find the idea that objective reality is ultimately irrelevant as merely an existential cop-out.
Objective reality is the very thing that gives human moral choice any relevancy whatsoever. To abandon its importance and say that an honorable delusion is better than facing a monstrous reality is the wholesale overthrow of any hope of meaning or civil human society.
We see the same dreadful problem in the recent film Atonement. To choose what is right according to objective reality is once again considered unimportant; what matters is creating moral meaning within our own subjective existence, no matter how much actual human misery our actions cause.
In Scorsese's existentialism, the self-promoting delusions of a serial murderer have the same moral value as the actions of a real hero such as an Oskar Schindler. The claim that meaning is only found in subjective experience destroys any hope of authentic meaning whatsoever.
This is the the very same monstrous philosophy that allows us to imagine contentedly that certain classes of people are simply less than viable as human beings and therefore eligible candidates for extermination for the good of the rest of humanity's quality of life, or the alternate delusion that we are somehow "saving the planet."
As brilliant as Shutter Island is as a film, its underlying philosophy is decrepit, insidious, and destructive to the meaning of human existence. Appreciate the objective reality of the talent and craftsmanship shown by the director and his actors, but reject the conclusions of its long-bankrupt underlying philosophical foundation.