This is one of those movies that I've never watched until now, but it has always been in my mind since I saw the trailer for it in theaters years ago...before Batman Begins maybe?
I remember the trailer creeping me out, and leading me to believe it was a balls to the wall horror film...I think the women with the weird eyes and sliced neck was focused on a lot. So I never got the courage to watch it until yesterday...
And...it's not actually a horror film like I thought it would be, it's more a psychological thriller, and that's fine.
But OOOOOF that ending. It's bad. The last thirty minutes of this film or so is a tragedy that I can only chalk up to studio executives wanting to spell things out for the audience.
So, the premise of the film is a U.S. Marshall played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his new partner go to investigate a missing person on Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane on an island. They're searching for a missing patient (who drowned her kids) and the U.S. Marshall secretly wants to also find the arsonist who killed his wife who may be there as well, oh, and he thinks they're turning patients into unfeeling supersoldiers.
From the beginning, like most movies dealing with mental illness you question what's real and what isn't...oh, is Leo actually a mental patient as well? Or is he being turned into a weapon through psychological and drug manipulation? That ambiguity is nice, and the film would've been better for it I think...leave things open ended.
But, the last bit of the movie goes to great lengths to hammer in the fact that Leo is a patient, a former U.S. Marshall who shot his wife after she drowned their kids. Fair enough. This is told through us by the head of the mental hospital taking out a whiteboard showing that the name of Leo's character and the name of the arsonist he's looking for, as well as the name of his wife and the name of the missing female patient, are anagrams of one another.
And that whiteboard is so on the nose...and so is the rest of the film from that point out. We then get a full flashback of Leo's wife drowning the kids and then him shooting her, which there was enough scenes interspersed between the movie to kind of make it a bit redundant, and then the head psychologist and Leo's partner, actually his doctor, more or less explain everything.
So, they decided to let Leo live out his delusions of still being a U.S. Marshall investigating the island to help him snap back to reality. Huh? It's also made clear that they legit let Leo basically do whatever he wanted while under the delusion, allowing him to freely wander the island more or less, interact with the other mental patients freely, etc.
It makes the film less "oh so what was real and what was an illusion" and more "so wait, they let him do THIS?". It kind of makes the whole movie retroactively kind of silly. It's almost so silly of a twist you almost believe that Leo really is a U.S. Marshall and he's being tricked into thinking he's insane, but nope, as far as I can tell we're supposed to legit accept that the head of the asylum decided the best thing to do to help a violent and delusional man was to basically let him do whatever he wanted and retreat into his fantasy. To help him?
I remember the trailer creeping me out, and leading me to believe it was a balls to the wall horror film...I think the women with the weird eyes and sliced neck was focused on a lot. So I never got the courage to watch it until yesterday...
And...it's not actually a horror film like I thought it would be, it's more a psychological thriller, and that's fine.
But OOOOOF that ending. It's bad. The last thirty minutes of this film or so is a tragedy that I can only chalk up to studio executives wanting to spell things out for the audience.
So, the premise of the film is a U.S. Marshall played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his new partner go to investigate a missing person on Shutter Island, a mental hospital for the criminally insane on an island. They're searching for a missing patient (who drowned her kids) and the U.S. Marshall secretly wants to also find the arsonist who killed his wife who may be there as well, oh, and he thinks they're turning patients into unfeeling supersoldiers.
From the beginning, like most movies dealing with mental illness you question what's real and what isn't...oh, is Leo actually a mental patient as well? Or is he being turned into a weapon through psychological and drug manipulation? That ambiguity is nice, and the film would've been better for it I think...leave things open ended.
But, the last bit of the movie goes to great lengths to hammer in the fact that Leo is a patient, a former U.S. Marshall who shot his wife after she drowned their kids. Fair enough. This is told through us by the head of the mental hospital taking out a whiteboard showing that the name of Leo's character and the name of the arsonist he's looking for, as well as the name of his wife and the name of the missing female patient, are anagrams of one another.
And that whiteboard is so on the nose...and so is the rest of the film from that point out. We then get a full flashback of Leo's wife drowning the kids and then him shooting her, which there was enough scenes interspersed between the movie to kind of make it a bit redundant, and then the head psychologist and Leo's partner, actually his doctor, more or less explain everything.
So, they decided to let Leo live out his delusions of still being a U.S. Marshall investigating the island to help him snap back to reality. Huh? It's also made clear that they legit let Leo basically do whatever he wanted while under the delusion, allowing him to freely wander the island more or less, interact with the other mental patients freely, etc.
It makes the film less "oh so what was real and what was an illusion" and more "so wait, they let him do THIS?". It kind of makes the whole movie retroactively kind of silly. It's almost so silly of a twist you almost believe that Leo really is a U.S. Marshall and he's being tricked into thinking he's insane, but nope, as far as I can tell we're supposed to legit accept that the head of the asylum decided the best thing to do to help a violent and delusional man was to basically let him do whatever he wanted and retreat into his fantasy. To help him?
