#730: Shutter Island

 

Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese
Initial release: February 17, 2010 (USA)

The human mind is a fascinating device. It's a three pound glob of electrified fat that lets us walk, do math, and worry about shit that doesn't matter. It's also very, very good at protecting itself. Subject it to the worst kind of emotional trauma imaginable and most of the time it'll find ways to avoid thinking about it. Most of the time this isn't too bad: we're all coping with trauma, after all, and society hasn't collapsed under the weight of that. Sometimes, though, the mind breaks rather spectacularly: either a genuine physical defect leads to it not working the way it should, or an abstract mental trauma is so painful the person is unable to deal with it in a healthy way and makes it everyone else's problem. While on its surface Shutter Island is another in a long line of mental institution horror stories, inspired by the infamous "snake pit" institutions of the mid-20th century before modern advances in pharmacology and therapy, what it's really about is grief and trauma.

The year is 1954. Edward "Teddy" Daniels and his partner Chuck Aule are U.S. Marshals, summoned to Shutter Island off the Boston coast. Shutter Island is the site of Ashecliffe Hospital, a mental institution and former Civil War fort. Teddy and Chuck are here to help in the search of an escaped patient. A hurricane is bearing down on Boston (a little research suggests it's Hurricane Edna) and so there's no leaving the island for a few days. Something is off about the place, though, and the more Teddy digs, the stranger things get, and the darker his dreams become: dreams of Dachau, which he was present in the liberation of (and the execution of its guards) and of his dead wife, supposedly killed in an apartment fire but there's a deeper, darker truth underneath the surface. Ashecliffe Hospital, with its sprawling grounds and the sinister monolith of Ward C (the interior of which is essentially a medieval dungeon, a deep hole where the hospital throws its worst cases in to be forgotten) looms large over everything, a symbol of institutional violence at a time when the mentally ill were still treated like animals. Teddy's confrontations with a German doctor (played by the late, great Max von Sydow) evoke the very real trauma of having been witness to the Holocaust, a nightmare created by very real, very human monsters. It's worth remembering, the Holocaust was beta-tested on Germany's disabled and mentally ill.

Sometimes when writing about movies like Shutter Island I have to gauge how much I want to tell the reader about the film versus how much I want to preserve the twist. Movies like this live and die on their twists, and reviewers need to balance their responsibility to the art with their responsibility to their audience. Sometimes the twist is stupid, like in M. Night Shamalan's The Village, which ended in such an insipid, insulting way that I felt I would be doing my audience a disservice by not ripping the movie and its twist to shreds; but Martin Scorsese is a master of his craft who has been making movies for sixty years, and while I don't particularly believe that age, tenure or accolades necessarily demand respect for an artist, I do believe that all else aside, his art certainly has earned that respect. So I can't really dive too much into the film; while those the psychiatric field might take issue with some of the specific pathologies on display in the film, they'd be missing the island for the institution, the bigger story that the film is trying to tell.

Shutter Island is one of Scorsese's rare psychological thrillers, a genuinely unsettling ride that at times straddles the line between thriller and horror. I'd hesitate to call the film horror, yet there's certainly plenty horror to be had: the horror of the Holocaust, of mental institutions still using barbaric treatment methods, of PTSD, of a failing marriage and of watching your partner descend into murderous insanity. At times it seems to dive into Silent Hill territory, especially in the dream sequences: piles of corpses in a deep void, no musical accompaniment but the distant thuds of a dark ambient track right out of Akira Yamaoka's repertoire. No wonder there's an entire map dedicated to referencing it in the smash hit Blood mod Death Wish (version 2.0 out very soon!)

I like Shutter Island. I like thrillers, in large part because I like horror, and what is a thriller but diet horror? It's got all the right ingredients for a classic gothic chiller: an isolated island, bad weather, secrets, lies and madness, but also a cast of dubious characters who may or may not be real, or even who they say they are. But it also pays its dues to new-school psychological horror, with its long shadows and noir-ish framing, and the ever-pervasive sense that monsters might lurk around every corner, hiding in human skin. In the same way that reality and delusion often intersect, so too does Shutter Island show that horror and thriller are at times the same genre.

-june❤