In Theaters: Shutter Island

A post-traumatic allegory whose potency is only deepened by its final turn of the screw, Shutter Island is most successful in manifesting physically the condition of emotional chaos and mental fracture. The climbing of stairs, haunting of corridors, and ominous succession of closed doors recall the dizzying despair of Vertigo and the internalized horror of The Shining; the sets and the location itself have all been devised to reflect a world -- a mind -- that has entrapped itself in a torment of unending mazes and unlightable corners. Teddy's motivations for taking the assignment at Shutter Island may be part of his search for closure: "I've had enough of killing. That's not why I'm here," he says, when it appears he has cause to seek revenge on a patient. "So what is this all about"? Chuck replies, the soul, as he is throughout, of empathic inquiry.

What it's all about tends to be delivered in big, barely digestible chunks of exposition and thesis-ese, which various characters are parachuted in to deliver. Teddy's encounters with many of these characters, including those played by Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Max Von Sydow and Ted Levine, have a more dream-like quality than his actual dreams. They say things like "That's the Kakfa-esque genius of it," and "If I were lean over and chew your eyeball out, would you be able to move quickly enough to stop me?" Wedged in between the crazy and the cliché of all of these exchanges is the constant plea for Teddy to let go of his dead wife -- an allusion to the film's portrait of the mid-century shift between barbaric and isolationist psychiatry to compassionate and talk-based care. "I can't," Teddy says. "Then you'll never leave this island," is the implied and then baldly stated reply.

What I couldn't escape is the feeling that Shutter Island is one of those films whose third act is meant not only to resolve but to fix the problems of the first two, and to an extent the gambit works. Those first two-thirds are more fun to think about afterwards than they are to sit through, and yet the confidence the structure presupposes -- that we will return to Shutter Island two or three times simply to mine its rich and referential mysteries -- is to be admired. Movies are our collective memory, as Scorsese loves to remind us, both in word and deed; should you find gaps in yours after a first, frenzied viewing of his latest, he'd be only too glad to refresh it.

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