Provided an epiphany for me

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2010)

For me Shutter Island was revelatory, in sympathy with the protagonist Teddy Daniels, the Marshal who comes to investigate the mysterious McCarthy-era Shutter Island asylum, I experienced feelings associated with metanoia. This is the theoretical process whereby the mind, or more specifically the model by which one understands the world, reforms itself as a result of challenge and becomes uplifted after a period of apparent mental illness. The feeling that it culminates in is a realisation that everything you understood before is wrong. By the end of the movie I felt lifted out of myself, as in a moment of clarity.
Shutter Island therefore seems to work the best when you associate with Teddy. If you do, you're forced into a deep introspection, where you realise how much of your persona is built out of coping strategies. The feelings it provoked in me were very personal, but I would expect that if the film "worked" for you they might be similarly cathartic. I felt I could feel how deluded I often am by depression, I felt how beautiful some of the people I know are, as if seeing them for the first time.
Aside from this wellspring of emotion, the film has plenty to offer in visual terms. Mr Scorsese and director of photography Robert Richardson provide strange and beautiful images in the movie, a darkened chamber, pools of dripping light beneath an antique, coffered, barrel-vaulted ceiling; golden hair, and a golden locket mingling with red blood; a family room softly snowing ash. There were also some horrifying images, concentration camp scenes that have drawn flak from critics. I think though that if you reject the film because of this, as Pontecorvo's concentration-camp-set Kapò was rejected, you throw the baby out with the bath water.
A big pitfall for twist movies can be the expositionary info-dump at the denouement, but for me it worked here, because I felt involved in the struggle for Teddy's soul.
Good acting is to be found all over, sprouting in abundance, like the daffodils in Spring; Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo di Caprio I feel steal the show, though the jeep ride with Ted Levine's Warden is one of the most astonishing things I have seen in a cinema, pure dream fabric.
I wonder if the choice of Penderecki and Ligeti in the soundtrack is a Kubrick homage (he used these both for The Shining). In any case the soundtrack choices are an triumphant. I was close to tears listening to a resetting of Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth" over the credits, and I'm not prone to such behaviour.
Obviously I can't recommend this film enough.