Friday 20 January 2012

Shutter Island

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Year:2010
Country of origin:USA
Director:Martin Scorsese
Genre:Psychological trauma thriller
Starring:Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow
Rating:4/5/
IMDB link:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/
Tagline:Someone is missing.
Favourite line:"If I were to sink my teeth into your eye, right now, could you stop me before I blinded you?"

Scorcese delivers - when does he not? - with this psych-thriller of some substance.

The plot:
It's 1954, and DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a Federal Marshall who is investigating a case of a missing patient on Shutter Island, home of an asylum, though the mystery is deeper than it may appear. The patient in question escaped from a heavily armed building and, more than that, she escaped from a locked room, with the door still locked from the outside.
Teddy and his partner, Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) begin their questioning, but it seems the authorities at the sanitarium are not being as cooperative as they might, and Teddy's feathers are ruffled further when it seems there may be medical experiments being conducted on the island, and the chief medical practitioner is German, bringing back memories of his time in Special Forces liberating a concentration camp.
As the investigations continue, so too do the mysteries multiply until, eventually, his own sanity will be called into question.

DiCaprio is excellent, as he tends to be these days (The Departed, The Aviator) and Scorcese certainly seems to get the best out of him.
Scorcese's direction is surprisingly subdued here, foregoing his sweeping establishing shots for the most part, leaving the score to be the star, a pompous, at times overblown affair that sets the mood perfectly.
Whilst it is true that, when we look back at Scorcese's body of work once he hangs up the camera, Shutter Island will be something of a footnote alongside the equally melodramatic Cape Fear, it certainly entertained for its entire running time.
A good film.

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