Martin Scorsese
Shutter Island

"This place makes me think. What would be better, living as a monster, or dying as a good man?" - Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The criteria one can use to evaluate a film can be numerous: screenplay, direction, cast performance, cinematography, scenography. But what should probably never be overlooked when evaluating a film is its ability to leave something behind the moment it ends, the moment the end credits start filling the screen. This ability is not lacking in Martin Scorsese's latest effort, Shutter Island.

"Shutter Island" is a film capable, once it's over, of keeping you outside the cinema discussing what you've just seen for at least twenty minutes. In reality, the screenplay is not the most original, and even the twist could, in a sense, be deemed predictable.

The story tells of Teddy Daniels, an FBI agent who, together with Chuck Aule, is sent to Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of Ashecliffe Asylum patient Rachel Solando, an infanticide who seems to have vanished without a trace. A hurricane will prolong the two agents' stay on the island, a stay that will fuel Daniels' suspicions about the institute's management, suspicions that will lead him to the discovery of increasingly disturbing details.

What makes "Shutter Island" a film worth watching is not the twist itself that characterizes the screenplay but the way this twist intervenes on it: the moment the "truth" (?) is discovered, everything the viewer has seen crumbles, overwhelming him like the rain of ash that overwhelms protagonist Teddy Daniels in his memories, in one of the most visually beautiful scenes of recent years and of Scorsese's filmography as a whole. In fact, the Italian-American director brings us a dark, distressing, claustrophobic thriller, but does not give up a certain poetry, drawing from the Gothic tradition, especially in the management of the scenographies. Leonardo DiCaprio masterfully plays the man of violence now typical of Scorsese's productions, although at times he seems to give the impression of repeating himself. However, perhaps Teddy Daniels is a man of violence with something more: Daniels not only seeks to remain brutally attached to his own world by taking refuge from his past but even tries to replace it with other images, other sensations, other actions, an attitude that is probably the result of a strong sense of guilt, which will lead him to ask the famous question of the finale, quoted at the beginning of the review.

The investigation he conducts on the island in search of the murderer could be seen as a search for himself, a bit like in "The Departed", a fairly recent film in Scorsese and DiCaprio's filmography, where the protagonists, the moles, are tasked with finding the moles, themselves indeed.

With "Shutter Island" Martin Scorsese takes us on a journey into daily horror, often found within us, ready to rise and take over the moment reason falls into that sleep that can create the worst monsters.