Fridae

Leonardo DiCaprio is a Boston detective and WW2 veteran summoned to an island with a mental facility for the criminally insane, whose treatment is administered by a very sinister duo of Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow. Will he locate the missing dangerous prisoner, solve the mystery surrounding its inmates and treatment programme, and get over his personal demons, or will his migraines, nightmares, and hallucinations get the better of him?

Vernon says

I guess we must be spoiled as movie audiences if Martin Scorsese’s latest thriller mystery can be figured out even before stepping into the cinema. That’s right, folks – we figured out the trick ending of Shutter Island just by watching the trailer, which we thought spelt out everything far too clearly. We wanted to give this movie a chance anyway, and hoped the trailer was a misrepresentation of the film.

As it turns out, Korean cinema is light years ahead of Hollywood. After a half decade of trick endings and second act plot twists in Korean horror and thrillers, even Martin Scorsese at his craftiest seems clumsy and too obvious.

I wish I could be charitable but taken on its own, Shutter Island isn’t anywhere near Scorsese’s better films. The director pay loving homage to film noir, and the sub-genre of films set in mental hospitals. However, all the little touches at recreating the noir atmosphere seem to blow up precisely because they’re overdone. Scorsese seems to go overboard - way overboard!!! - with the atmospherics. Ridiculously loud blaring trumpets, violins and snares jostle for your attention with overlong technicolour hallucinatory sequences. These effects feel so forced that instead of contributing to any atmosphere, they make the plot twist all too obvious.

Don’t let me get you down; aside from the script and its editing, the film is indeed well-made. A hefty DiCaprio plays up well to heavy-weights Kingsley and von Sydow, and their inspired performances do shine through the artifice of the film, and hint at how more subtle and accomplished Shutter Island could have been if Scorcese, his editor, and the composer had not gone overboard.

Enming says

Back when this reviewer was doing his military service, he read Dennis Lehane's novel Shutter Island on a lazy afternoon. It was an enjoyable lightweight read with a twist that caught this reviewer offguard, and overall, a very enjoyable tribute to this reviewer's favorite genre of film: the Noir.

Noir was the term used by French critics to characterise the dark, fatalistic, world-weary and yet romantic crime thrillers that dripped with atmosphere throughout the late 30s to the late 50s.

Shutter Island is meant to be Martin Scorsese's grand tribute to that Golden Age, it was meant to be the Kill Bill of noir. That great big stew of a tribute to the movies he loved. Lehane's novel has supplied all the noir staples: the haunted sleuth, the ominous locations, the overhanging spectres of wasted lives. And it's all fueled by a set of entertaining performances and great visuals.

DiCaprio has been making the transition well into a mature leading man from his past as a teenage heartthrob in recent years, his youthful good looks giving way to a pug-faced jowliness resembling the tortured squinters once played by John Garfield. His newfound weariness has not disappointed in his recent films and neither does it here, while Ben Kingsley offers an oily villainous charm as Dr Cawley, who may or may not be hiding something, and Max von Sydow looks ready to play chess with death again as Kingsley's very sinister superior, Dr Naehring.

Visually and musically Scorsese turns it up to 11: pounding snare drums, screeching jazz violins, and the lush tones of Mahler define the film's spare but unsubtle score. Cinematographer Robert Richardson, who also shot the Kill Bill films, gives us a colour palate in which menace lies coiled within the heart of beauty like a serpent.

Consensus

Beautiful, atmospheric but ultimately less than the sum of its parts, Shutter Island could have been a superior thriller only if it had a little more subtlety and nuance.

Hee En Ming is a professional movie buff and an amateur human being.