Shutter Island

A stormy island filled with nightmare and mystery: check. An ensemble of melodramatically shady characters: check. Dark, earth-toned coloring and grippingly suspenseful camerawork: check. One angry-eyed and shifty-looking Leonardo DiCaprio: double check.

There's no doubt. Martin Scorsese found all the tastiest ingredients for a psychological thriller and he executes them with the exceptional talent we've come to expect from a Scorsese flick.

Enter Leonardo DiCaprio as the U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, a World War II veteran haunted by the atrocities of war and the untimely death of his wife. Daniels has been called in to investigate the disappearance of an inmate from her cell in a mental institution for the criminally insane. Taking only the nightmares of his past and his new, somewhat saucy partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), with him, Daniels enters the prison only to find that everything is not business as usual in this prison.

From the starting gate, we can tell this isn't a run-of-the-mill Scorsese flick. If anything, we get the impression that Scorsese is being outright playful with the genre of the dark, historical thriller. He cues an ominous soundtrack as the island looms on the horizon and an unnecessarily stiff ferry captain goes out of his way to make sure the audience knows the island is an inescapable deathtrap. Even the prison guards and orderlies, typified by the almost criminally violent alpha-male warden (Ted Levine), come across as overly dramatic.

And yet somehow the effect is anything by cheesy. The feel of the film is stiff at first, but the stereotypical aloofness of the guards is brilliantly contrasted by the performances of Ruffalo and Michelle Williams, who plays Daniels's late wife. As Daniels delves deeper into the workings of the island prison, he is subjected to alternating interactions with institution doctors, who only seem to answer his questions when it suits them, and his happy-go-lucky but helpful partner, Chuck. The more Daniels switches back and forth between the two, the more he and the audience lose their sense of who to trust. The overall effect is fantastic and contributes impressively to the developing sense of paranoia.

The other half of the story is told through flashbacks and dream sequences, both of which steadily bleed into each other by the film's end. Scorsese isn't afraid to play the dream-within-a-dream card here, but we forgive him the cliché because, at the end of the night, Daniels's dreams are incredibly vivid and emotionally stirring. As we watch Daniels holding his wife in loving embrace at the center of a burning apartment, the falling ash seamlessly melts into rain and Daniels finds himself back on the storming island. That juxtaposition of realities plays the centerpiece in this film, and it's the reason we're left not really knowing what's what. Even Daniels misplacing his cigarettes at the start of the movie is oddly unsettling and contributes to his growing sense of disorientation.

If anything was drastically right about this film, it was DiCaprio's satisfyingly eerie characterization of Teddy Daniels. There's seldom a time when DiCaprio isn't shooting someone his piercingly sideways glance, and his expressions and interactions throughout the flashback sequences range from cold impassiveness to childlike docility to utter horror. He is simultaneously the spitting image of a soldier storming the beach at Normandy and a troubled widower searching desperately for answers. The tragedy of 2009 Oscars just might be that they came too early to honor DiCaprio's performance here.

Match all this with some truly artful action close-ups and you've got a film that masterfully strings you along. Robert Richardson's cinematography is just as playful as Scorsese's directing, employing some techniques that few movies outside a Scorsese flick might be able to pull off. The camera's point-of-view entrance into the prison was just about the most gripping shot in the film, and the abrupt snatches of DiCaprio lighting match after match to illuminate a pitch black jail cell create exactly the atmosphere of horror that has been missing from scary movies as of late.

The bottom line: Shutter Island has a penchant for the dramatic, almost in an old-fashioned way. But the nightmare scenes strike a chord with the surreal and are provided in just the right dosage to pique the audience's interest without trying its suspension of disbelief. Overall, the story proves forgettable, not lending anything original or exciting that we haven't seen before. The movie is more a demonstration that in any genre exceptional men can make an exceptional film. Even if it's not Scorsese's finest, it's a fine job indeed.