long-form shutter island review

Spoilers ahead, such as they are. Be ye warned.

My short form review went like this:

Shutter Island: too far from scorsese’s best. Not sure he could have packed more overdone psych/horror tropes into 2hr without slaying coeds

So yes I was a bit disappointed in this film especially as I am a huge fan of Scorsese (hell, I even sat through and enjoyed Gangs of New York), and I kept looking for little glimmers of his touch in the movie and found far too few. There are a couple of good 360 tête-à-têtes, a few long tracking shots and a spark of crackling dialogue here and there… but not much else.

I’m not going to summarise the plot, you’ve seen the trailer if not the whole flick. I’ll dive straight in to the main nut of my problem with the movie, as I tweeted: there was nothing new here and without novelty the twists lacked all punch. What psychological thrillers in this vein thrive on is surprise, the *click* as it falls into place and the viewer has to re-examine everything that’s come before in light of the new revelation — think about the moment at the end of Usual Suspects when Agent Kujan fits Verbal’s story together with the scraps of the bulletin board, or whatever point in Memento you figured out what was really going on — these are the rewards of the genre and Shutter Island denies them to us by revealing it too early and with way too heavy of a hand.  The moment Teddy describes his Laeddis with a scar across his whole face and mis-matched eyes, his monstrosity/otherness is just too far out there to be anything but a construct. The names are anagrams! The extra prisoner is really him! Stop me if you’ve heard this before… a dozen or two times.

Aside from the dual-identity theme, Shutter Island’s horror elements pull from a bag of tricks as old as film itself without any apparent self-awareness. The soundtrack as the agents enter the perimeter was bombastic enough that Jen — who’s hard of hearing — turned to me and said “That music is a bit much, eh?” The Cocteau-esque nightmare sequences, the lightning on the scary mansion (Norman Bates much?), the storm in the graveyard (why did they go there, again?) all left me, a certified horror flick wuss, groaning more than shivering.  It all crescendos in Teddy’s excursion up to Ward C where the clanking chains and dripping water and — of course the lights go out — grabbing hands got some legitimate jumps out of the audience.  But even the dead children didn’t creep me out as much as they felt sad and inevitable.

Which is where I’ll close, with one fact-check criticism rather than an artistic comment: was his crime really bad enough to get him committed to the worst of the worst max security psycho wards? I suppose Dr Cawley’s explanation that he’s trained to violence and immersed in his dissociative identity (and therefore presumably needed to be committed even after the proximate cause of his breakdown was removed) makes a bit of sense, but I left thinking that his crime was actually pretty understandable and not at all commensurate with the punishment awaiting him at the end of the icepick.  Hardly “life as a monster” — so it’s a false dichotomy that concludes a flawed, ultimately disappointing film.