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Rating:
As I write this review, I still have a feeling of unease and anguish that slips from my mind down my body with unnatural slowness. Horror is difficult to remove, and "Shutter Island" is the epitome of the most insane and everyday evil. The evil that only a human being can harbor within. So while you watch the movie, the cinema hall empties, you remain alone on that chair, which suddenly becomes uncomfortable, and you wish you could sink into it to hide.
Martin Scorsese has returned to being the greatest. He enjoys playing with the dark labyrinths of the mind, like a cat with a mouse, or worse. Here everything is hidden, ready to leap out of the darkness with devastating ferocity. When the sunlight illuminates the mental labyrinths, it's too late; you come out with broken bones. Scorsese has become the most sadistic of psychologists, a vengeful and ruthless Freud.
A film about madness, complete with dreams and visions that only David Lynch of Twin Peaks had dared to show us. A more visionary and psychotic "Spider" (Cronenberg).
The excellent Leonardo DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a former American soldier, who, returning from World War II ("it was no longer war. It was murder") traumatized, dedicates himself to his work as a detective. He lost his wife, his only love, in a fire and cannot come to terms with it. Now he is alone. He wears a horrible tie. He is alone.
Teddy is sent to investigate the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of a patient, who exterminated her own children, from the island's asylum. Once the investigation begins, we sink into madness.
Nothing. You can't trust anything anymore. Hallucination and reality become one. Teddy ends up in a maze, and we follow him in free fall.
Scorsese deceives us, deceives everyone, and he does it with a class that few directors have. The world becomes an island populated by madmen and maniacs, an island with no escape routes, where the atomic bomb and other wartime atrocities are just horror tales, they are a "bogeyman."
Everything becomes a Platonic cave myth (the dialogue in the cave is emblematic of this), where every truth is tainted and covered with lies until we can free ourselves and escape. Until Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) reveals the harsh reality to us.
Once the situation is uncovered, after the director has bombarded us with images of appalling violence for most of the film, another blow falls on our psyche so that until the end of the story, we are led to hope it's all an illusion. Scorsese shows us the horror of the everyday (which I won't reveal) with Oscar-worthy direction and images of rare visual power. Perfect. From the very first scene (on the ship, you feel an immense seasickness), everything is excellent.
The music is spot on. Often there is only a long disturbing noise that becomes silent when necessary. Then, suddenly, a devastating noise. A match is struck, but it feels like a bomb.
The atmosphere seems to come straight out of the video game (I emphasize video game) "Silent Hill" and is so unsettling it gives you chills (the scene with the rain of ash is anthology-worthy), sometimes it feels like watching a "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" set in the soul's abyss.
Adapted from the book by Dennis Lehane, Martin Scorsese gives us a story about human horror of unimaginable violence. The question "why are you all wet?" is a bit like "why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?" in Donnie Darko, except in "Shutter Island," when you discover the answer, you wish you had never asked anything.
If this film leaves you unmoved, you are ice. In fact, you are not alive.
Masterpiece.
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