Shutter Island

[John Gonzalez]

I don’t normally use the word harrowing. It sounds like a person taking themselves too seriously. Much like appalled or ashamed or affronted, but harrowing is the right word here. It’s a very sinister film from the outset but nothing too disturbing right up until the climatic twist and resulting flashbacks. Scorsese is known for transcendence and endurance when it comes to portraying suffering and naturally portrays a lot of it, but I do believe this is the most acutely upsetting thing he has ever filmed. It’s also his best film since Casino… In my opinion… Which is often heavily swayed by having just watched the thing. Plus I seem to have an inverted view of the intervening films to most people that I’ve talked to, since, I love Kundun and Bringing Out The Dead, and I thought Shine a Light was better than The Aviator. I can’t really talk about Shutter Island without going into detail about the twist and so if you haven’t seen it yet (you should, as soon as possible) don’t read on.

So, of course, the twist is that DiCaprio’s character is in fact a paranoid fantasist who killed his wife because she drowned his there children, and thus needs to live an alternate version of reality because the truth is too painful. Which sounds like the oldest trick in the book (he was mad all along, it was all a dream, he’s really a ghost) but the ingenious thing about Shutter Island is that you’re primed not to believe the twist when it’s revealed. The character believes that he is being tricked into thinking he is crazy and the audience is behind him, and so the reality has to be really beaten into him and the audience. It’s a really stunning process which of course features the harrowing flashbacks. We find that the doctors of Shutter Island are in fact compassionate and that Shutter Island itself is not really a hell, at least not in the sense that it was originally painted. And essentially, we realise that, despite being a mystery thriller this is just like any other Scorsese film, it’s the story of an aggressive and confused larger-than-life hero who is seduced by a need to violently and seductively assert himself and who is shown in the end to be pathetic and broken next to the characters who are ordinary or even compassionate.