Shutter Island is a mentally stimulating and emotionally engaging psychological thriller that forcefully takes advantage of common conventions and plot devices to keep the audience struggling to stay a step ahead of the story. Author Dennis Lehane is wickedly deceitful, forcing the reader to question everything they are led to believe, skilfully using deception and suspicion to drive the narrative. Clues, characters and plot developments are forced to be rethought from page to page, resulting in a whirlwind of conflict and ambiguity by the story’s end. All of this is punctuated by an unrelenting imagery of desperation and a feeling that on Shutter Island reality is always at risk of slipping away. The atmosphere of the story is bleak as anything, with powerful icy waves pounding the craggy cliffs surrounding the island and a thick white fog encroaching from all sides, there is an ever-present ghostly sense of claustrophobia and isolation. Lehane brings all of this together in the novel by filtering the story through the eyes of its protagonist, Teddy Daniels, perfect embodiment of the unreliable narrator. The more time we spend on Shutter Island, the less we trust Daniels, who we begin to understand is no less honest than the rest of the characters. The reader thus plays two roles throughout the story: the hopeful Teddy loyalist, supportive and playing cheerleader from inside his head, and the Private Investigator, looking for the truth in all of Daniels’ thoughts and actions from the outside. Lehane’s Shutter Island is an intriguing exploration of reality internal versus external and delves into the conflict that arises when the relation between them is thrown off balance.
Martin Scorsese’s turn of the story is a rare case of parallel lines. The film nails both the broad strokes and the details of the source material to a degree that allows each medium to strengthen the other, while not detracting from either. However it’s Scorsese’s deft hand at filmmaking that brings the movie together. There is a lot of subtle camera manipulation at work in Shutter Island: jarring cuts, quick unnatural pans and deliberate, faint inconsistencies from shot to shot are combined with several surreal, sometimes supernatural events to offset the viewer’s comfort and distort reality. I’m reminded of Bram Stoker’s Dracula where laws of physics seem not to apply when in the presence of the Count – water falls up, shadows act independently of their possessor. In this way the camera takes the place of the first-person; we can’t view the movie from inside DiCaprio’s head so it’s the camera lens that we must learn to distrust. If a cup should disappear from one shot to the next, are we to believe the cup was ever there? Or is the event even taking place at all? In less capable hands this aspect, effectively the most important aspect, could be lost. Leonardo DiCaprio is good as ever in the lead, lending gravitas to a multi-faceted character, while opposite him Ben Kingsley manages equal parts sinister and compassionate beneath a resolute politeness.
At its centre Shutter Island is a fantastically eerie thriller, immersed in chilling tension. It questions the nature of perception, and tells a winding story that tugs on the audience’s curiosity until its end. While the novel takes full advantage of literary conventions and tools to deliver its story, the adaptation feels just as organic on screen. As a stand-alone movie, Shutter Island holds a slight edge over other thrillers in its camp for all the talent behind it shines, and as an adaptation of a great book it gets high praise from me.
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