Potentially a good movie

Rating: 7/10 (9 March 2010)

Unlike many of the other reviewers, I actually thought this movie wasn't scary at all. Rats, people with scars, Nazis - this is all being used BETTER before. The movie as a horror fails. The movie as a mystery fails completely. I don't think someone will buy this story since Memento said it all.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!!!
Please know, that I reveal the full story - incl. the ending.
The story is about a guy, who was a US Marshall- married, with 3 children. He didn't pay enough attention to his wife and drank too much. His wife was unhappy and had mental problems. One day she got completely insane and murdered their 3 children. When our main character, the US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) gets home, he found his wife completely crazy, his children murdered. So he can't take this - he shoots her, so that she doesn't have to be put away. But this whole guilt destroys him slowly. He also gets insane, paranoid and have to be put away. His guilt kills him slowly from the inside, and so he creates this imaginary world - where he is still a Marshall and he investigates a disappearance of a patient from the mental hospital. The doctors in the hospital try through the whole movie to help him, to make him face the truth. And in the end he does. But what can you do when you can't take the truth, when it is too much to bare? How can you live with all this guilt? Isn't it better to be insane and not face the reality?
The movie is following the book very strictly, except the ending. THE ENDING isn't shocking, or scary. It is purely dramatic and rises moral questions.
I think this movie fails completely to be scary movie, thriller or whatever Dicaprio and Scorcese intended. But I think accidentally they found something deeper, something really dramatic and interesting.
The big problem is, they didn't go further with that, but basically count on cheap tricks to scary the audience, instead of make her think.