Word: islander
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...distorted mirrors, then pulls the expertly woven rug of plausibility from under their feet to reveal the scary graffiti on the floor. Whether you feel enlightened or swindled is your call. But stick around for the final scene, where self-knowledge may redeem the biggest monster on Shutter Island...
...that he's "the rat in a maze"; one woman scribbles the urgent word run on his notepad. His partner Chuck discounts the testimony, saying, "How're you gonna believe a crazy guy?" But Chuck too is under Teddy's suspicion; they'd never met before getting on the island ferry, where Chuck greeted him with a cheerful "Teddy Daniels, the man, the legend." Is Chuck a man or a myth, an ally or a red herring? (See the top 10 movie performances...
While Teddy tries to separate the insanity on the island from his own reality, Scorsese interlaces the more or less straightforward filming of the interrogation scenes with the hallucinogenic tragic realism of Teddy's nightmares. At Dachau, corpses stir and papers flutter; with his wife, the camera executes a 360 around the couple as Dolores dissolves in Teddy's embrace, her ashes swirling around the room. A grieving man's conversation with his dearly departed has become a peculiar subtheme in a half-dozen recent movies, from Up last summer to Edge of Darkness a few weeks...
Touch of Evil That's partly because Teddy feels estranged from the island's less ethereal inhabitants. DiCaprio makes Teddy sometimes cagey-witty, sometimes stupid (he keeps mispronouncing escape as excape). Gruff and heavier than usual, with a few days' beard, he could be channeling Orson Welles' wily lawman in Touch of Evil. The onetime heartthrob from Titanic has always been a shifty character actor in a movie star's body. A star performance here would give the audience someone to root for; DiCaprio instead provides them with the spectacle of a creature fighting to creep toward a freedom that...
...jokes and jolts, that they may misread or discard the picture's potent message: that some things about ourselves are so painful to acknowledge, we almost wish we could cut them out of our skulls. This, and not the plot gimmickry, is what must have lured Scorsese to Shutter Island: the chance to leave audiences with an illuminating emptiness...