OBS at the Movies

SHUTTER ISLAND

Review by Tameka Nelson

Paramount Pictures Presents

Shutter Island

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Laeta Kalogridis (screenplay)

Dennis Lehane (novel)

I don’t like scary movies.  I blame Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm St., and my parents for letting my sister take me to see it.  When I first read about Shutter Island in the trades last year, I instantly put it on my “pass” list.  But then I saw the commercial, Leonardo DiCaprio holding a woman who crumbled into ashes as he stood in a burning room. That visual alone, no words spoken, hooked me in.  The physiological thriller leaped on my “must see” list and I was ready to hand over my $14.

The story begins with federal marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) heading to a maximum security mental-ward to investigate a criminally insane prisoner’s disappearance; a young mother who drowned her three children.

As Daniels tries to unravel the clues of the woman’s disappearance from a bolted door room, the audience is catapulted into his constant anxiety and private anguish.  He’s a WWII veteran who is haunted by vivid memories of his dead wife, whose killer is also at the mental ward, and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. 

Shutter Island is a twisted, mystical thriller which keeps you emotionally invested from the beginning to the very last scene. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie encompasses a Hitchcock aura filled with questionable delirium of who is sane and who isn’t.   As the story unravels, deep down in your gut, you know the answer.  It’s the “why” that keeps you guessing. Even past the credits.