Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Sir Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley

Director: Martin Scorsese

Screenwriter: Laeta Kalogridis (screenplay) / Dennis Lehane (novel)

Scorsese has often spoken of his ‘one for the studio, one for yourself’ approach to filmmaking, or rather this approach has often been discussed by critics, moviegoers and Scorsese-fans alike. Casting an eye over his career and it’s clear to see where particular films in his body of work lie: Cape Fear, one of his most successful but least personal films, is one ‘for them’; Gangs Of New York, the ambitious but flawed pet project Scorsese nurtured for years before bringing it to the screen and nearly crippling Mirmax in the process, is one ‘for him’. This approach seemingly allows him the enviable position of being able to work within the studio system yet still make the films that he wants to make. His latest, the psychological gothic horror Shutter Island, which opened Stateside to the biggest box office opening weekend of his career, seemingly sits in neither of these camps though but rather straddles them both.

Adapted from the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone), Shutter Island is Scorsese doing it for the kicks; it’s slick, stylish, chillingly effective (in places), and beautiful to the eye. Yet there is something clinical, impersonal, and distancing too, and it never reaches, nor does it aim to, the compelling storytelling (Jake LaMotta’s fall from grace), the bravura camerawork (Goodfellas’ Copacabana club steadicam magic) or the sheer guts and glory exemplified by his very finest work – that of an artist at the top of his game exercising masterful control over his chosen medium.

Leonardo DiCaprio, taking his fourth Scorsese bow, takes the lead here as 1950s FBI agent Teddy Daniels who has been sent to the titular island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane off the coast of Boston, to search for missing patient Rachel Solando. Only his investigation doesn’t go as planned. Searching the labyrinthine institution, he faces tough opposition in the shape of the hospital’s twin pillars of authority – the secretive chief psychiatrist Doctor Cawley (Kingsley), who favours therapy over lobotomy, and the confrontational Dr Naehring (Von Sydow), who’s professional inclinations lie the other way round. But as Teddy’s discoveries force him to look deep inside the hospital and its machinations, he finds he must search within himself too if he is to uncover the truth.

From the opening scene where Teddy and partner Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) appear through the fog aboard a ramshackle boat taking them to the hospital, Shutter Island is presented as a sinister place of mystery and secrets, a place where a question is answered with a question, where facts are blurred, and where nothing, and no one, is as it seems. Scorsese sets about constructing an air of suspicion and paranoia, and in calling on his not discernible bag of cinematic tricks, he fashions a foreboding mood and tone. Illustrated with plumes of cigarette smoke, by thunder and lightning from the storm that imprisons Teddy and Chuck on the island, with light and shadow used to create a dreamlike, hypnotic, waking reverie, Shutter Island is a sensory assault to manipulate and unsettle, to mislead and misdirect, and this here is the film’s raison d’etre. Teddy’s investigation, his interviews of inmates and staff, his search of the three wards that house the patients, are punctuated by characters and reveals that move his investigation forward, but it is the journey itself, not the destination, that is the purpose.

Scorsese holds water-tight control over the film and its pacing; every development, every revelation, every shot, angle and musical cue, is carefully constructed to achieve a particular goal, to heighten the mood and amp up the tension, and these are put front and centre with the drip-drip feed of every passage revealing another aspect to a patient, to a suspect, to a motive, or another facet to the events as they have been presented. While conspiracies and cover-ups abound (mind control experiments run by the hospital’s Nazi hierarchy; Teddy’s self-manufactured arrival at the hospital), the island’s waters are muddied further by Teddy’s tormenting flashbacks to his time in the Second World War, the discovery of a German POW camp and the death of his wife in a mysterious fire, all of which throw his own motives and morals into disarray. Shutter Island’s secrets come into focus only to disappear once more behind another layer of subterfuge.

Stylistically, Scorsese is at the top if his game, and employs some well-placed CG, most memorably when Teddy cradles an apparition of his deceased wife before she turns to dust and crumbles away in his arms, and indulges in some accomplished set pieces, particularly a tracking shot where a Nazi concentration camp soldiers are machine-gunned at close range by American soldiers. Far from being the Leo and Marty show though, it is far more of an ensemble piece. Ruffalo holds a fine performance as Teddy’s partner, Jackie Earle Haley contributes an almost cameo-esque performance as a disfigured patient, snarling in the shadows like an animalistic Hannibal Lecter, and Kingsley is superb as the doc who you’re never sure to believe or not.

Yet the cold and the clinical feeling permeates throughout, and there is a lack of emotion underpinning the narrative, particularly given its themes of loss, grief and guilt. Despite all the twist and turns and red herrings (or are they?), the third act twist is not the rug-puller it wants, or perhaps should, be. Some of the subplots amount to less than they should as the misdirection takes prominence when it would have worked more effectively were it employed to smudge the edges and the film finds itself, as a result, occasionally stumbling around in a maze of dead ends and deception. An admittedly well presented maze, but a maze nonetheless. It’s not style and no substance, far from it, but the style takes first place, the substance a cursory second. It’s a trip that’s worth taking, and wholly enjoyable, but you can’t quite shake the feeling that Scorsese’s next one, a film made solely ‘for him’, will see the ‘greatest living American director’ back to his unparalleled best.

By Alasdair Morton

Shutter Island is released on 12^th March via Paramount Pictures.