Shutter Island Review

Scorsese makes a full-blown Gothic here, all storm-lashed cliffs and expressionist shadow, and the pleasure is watching a master work in a register he usually leaves alone. Robert Richardson lights Ashecliffe like a fever, hard edges on wet stone, and the hurricane sequences give the island a real sense of being sealed off from any rescue. Leonardo DiCaprio pitches Teddy Daniels at a barely contained grief that reads as overacting until the last twenty minutes retroactively make it the point.

Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow supply the calm, and Michelle Williams haunts the flashbacks with a stillness the rest of the film lacks. The Dachau material is the strongest thing in it, and the lakeside flashback is the only scene that plays as tragedy rather than machinery. The twist is guessable well before the reveal and the picture is a little too pleased with its own atmospherics. But the closing exchange about living as a monster or dying as a good man gives the whole exercise an ache the genre rarely bothers with. This is Scorsese in second gear, which still means superb construction.