Shutter Island
Director: Martin Scorsese
I love movies that turn the viewer out, and make you take a closer look at the parameters of your reality. The Sixth Sense did this with life and death, and Shutter Island does it with mental stability and psychosis. By the end of the movie you realize that you are the lion that’s been made to jump through the director’s flaming hoops.
I have never read the book, but this movie is thoughtfully laid out. It takes your hand and gently leads you into the gaping jaw of the beast, and you do not know you are even there until you turn around to see its razor-sharp teeth about to clamp down. There is a moment within which you have time to escape, but you hesitate, because by now you are not sure that you even want to escape. Such is the fiendish seduction of Shutter Island. It’s clever, I’ll give it that, and there are some subtle but effectively used visual effects and mood cinematography. If you can get past the absurd, horrendously overdone sound effects/music at the very beginning of the movie, you might find Shutter Island quite interesting.
Leonardo DeCaprio is Teddy Daniels, our avatar who unwittingly betrays us in the end. He is sent with his new partner and fellow U.S. Marshal, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) to Shutter Island, a maximum security hospital/prison for the criminally insane, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of one of the “patients.” 
Ben Kingsley gives an inspired performance as the “Wizard of Oz-like” Dr. Cawley, the director of the facility. As the investigation unfolds, we learn bits and pieces about Teddy Daniels’ past through a haze of psychotropically induced visions and dreams. And by the end of the tale you don’t know whether you are coming or going. But hey, what is reality, after all?
I give Shutter Island 3 hits:
