Martin Scorsese’s new film, “Shutter Island”, is bound to be a confusing experience for audiences expecting a conventional suspense thriller.  This is partly because the film, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, is pointedly conventional in many outward respects.  A U.S. Marshal investigates the mysterious escape of an inmate in a prison for the criminally insane.   Set on a small, storm-blasted island in Boston Harbor, the mystery is Gothic to its core, with a castle, dire eccentrics, and ghostlike figures walking about.  The New England pallor and the guards in their trim navy blue uniforms evoke Stephen King’s prison tales.  There’s even a hurricane that strikes the island, forcing the characters to take match-lit walks through dungeons, graveyards, and a chapel perilous.  Stock elements in place, Scorsese follows Teddy Daniels (a rumpled Leonoardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) as they attempt to track down the escaped patient, Rachel Solando.

The trouble with “Shutter Island” is that without quite losing its air of mystery, the film divulges its main secret practically from the first scene (or even the too-informative trailer, which seems to have been running in theaters for three years).  We meet Teddy heaving up his guts inside a bathroom on the ferry to the island.  Gripping the steel sink feverishly, he gazes into a mirror and says, through gritted teeth, “Pull yourself together, Teddy”.  A traumatized-looking man—complete with a bandage on his forehead, an unexplained but telltale detail—staring in a mirror on his way to an insane asylum pretty much screams “multiple identities”.  Told from Teddy’s point of view, it’s clear we may not be able to trust everything he’s seeing.  Scorsese punctuates Teddy’s oddness when the warden and guards who greet his arrival on the island glare at him as if ready to pounce on the merest of provocations.  The deputy warden makes them surrender their guns, and Chuck fumbles like a bad actor as he takes his off his belt.  The island’s top headshrinker, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), tells him Rachel Solando invented elaborate fictions in which everyone—the warden, the guards, the patients—must play out roles imagined by the madwoman. The truth about Teddy couldn’t have been more telegraphed.

But is the film trying to build suspense or create a believable and sufficiently creepy world in which fantasy and reality blur together in the mind of a deeply damaged man?  With its close, first-person narrative, “Shutter Island” drops us into the labyrinth of Teddy’s nightmares, delusions, and paranoid fantasies (and meta-fantasies).   The film recalls Robbe-Grillet’s masterpiece “The Erasers”, a detective story in which the hero’s identity may be an anagram, as it were, for the killer’s.  The plot is a maze of mirrors, an inward-bound Russian-doll journey, replete with memory-traces that give the story a looping, dreamlike quality.  The solution to the ‘mystery’ is beside the point.  Most moviegoers will figure out the truth about Teddy early on.  Watching Teddy figure it out becomes the focal point.  Scorsese’s masterful use of the shadowy Gothic setting, teeming with grotesques, keeps Teddy fumbling in the dark.  A minimalist, brooding film score compiled by Robbie Robertson, including John Cage, Brian Eno, and Nam June Paik, punctuates the story’s sneaky discontinuities.  Scorsese likes to throw scenes off-kilter with editing, in time with some of the more jarring orchestral pieces.  His tried-and-true visual tricks, like running the film backward to give a scene an almost subliminal, momentary sidestep into the uncanny, also intensify the foreboding.

Scorsese’s imagery is as bold as ever, too.  The inmates, each hiding secrets they won't or can't tell, breed the squirms and then some.  A bleeding Nazi lies spread out on a floor with papers floating overhead like confetti.  There’s a surreal dream sequence in which Teddy meets his dead wife, who first bleeds, then smolders like dying firewood while ashes gently rain down in their once-cozy home.   The scenes in Dachau, nightmarish memories of Teddy’s service in World War II, are more than grisly enough to horrify in a way not easily forgotten.  Infernal pictures of bodies piled up outside of freight cars, like a haul of shrimp spilled carelessly out of crates on a pier, court the charge of exploitation; far from appalling realism, they resemble a mountain of wax corpses borrowed from the set of a particularly gruesome Wes Craven film.  But we are implicitly asked to question the ‘documentary’ provenance of these images, especially after we see the massacre of the Nazi prison guards in which Teddy ‘remembers’ taking part, so it is perhaps very much to the point that Teddy’s mind would recreate his memories as B-movie horror tableaux.

What Scorsese’s direction gives the movie, to balance the slackening of the mystery plot, is shape and logic, albeit the twisting logic of a nightmare.  The subtle question that emerges is not whether Teddy is sane or not.  Rather, the film explores where the dividing line is drawn between a mind broken by insanity and a mind broken by guilt.  But it is a personal guilt in the shadow of history.  Teddy’s ‘memories’ of liberating the camp at Dachau, as well as the mention made by a few of the prisoners of “bombs that turn whole cities to ash”, fix his anxieties very much in the world of 1954.  “Shutter Island” wants to be about the way we try to make sense of the atrocities men have always committed against other men, as well as the singular atrocities of the Holocaust and the nuking of Japan.  Teddy is a guilty man, punishing himself over and over for the lives he could not save.  In one scene he is aghast at the sight of a murdered woman and her daughter, and later the scene reappears in his mind, only with his wife and daughter in place of the slain in Dachau.  His personal tragedy mingles with the species’ tragedy—incomprehensible horror, fathomlessly wretched crimes.  Nor is guilt all: Teddy is probably also a paranoiac, and one of the film’s intriguing undercurrents is his inchoate suspicion of a broader conspiracy, in America as much as the island itself, keep bubbling to the surface.  Another patient talks of “atolls” and atom bombs, another of HUAC, another of Americans continuing the Nazi eugenics program. 

The paranoia theme peaks with his encounter with Rachel Solando—that is, the 'real' Solando—inside a cave near the island’s lighthouse.  Here, in a scene rather like the “Mr. X” scene in “JFK”, the hero’s conviction that a conspiracy is afoot is not only revealed as justified, it’s actually shown as far less terrifying than the real truth.  Shutter Island, it seems, is a government experiment to create soulless, brainwashed soldiers who can kill without scruple.  The twist, however, is that unlike “JFK” there is the additional message that the real world and the mirror world of lies are no longer distinguishable.  Emily Mortimer, playing Rachel with crazy-eyed intensity (helped by amusingly over-the-top flames flickering between her and Teddy), explains that she was originally a doctor, and her “reasonable protest” against the hospital's practices-- from a sane professional, from a woman “from a good family”-- was not enough.  “They’ll say you’re crazy”, she warns Teddy.  The psychotropic drugs she describes guarantee that protest against the island—and by extension against America—can be immediately and fully discredited.  The film glances at other paranoiac fictions, like those of George Orwell, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon; above all Lehane seems to have used Kafka as a model, a writer who immortalized vivid, ten-ton nightmares hatched in unstable minds.  “Shutter Island” seems to suggest that a sane grasp of reality—the reality of the twentieth century—would lead a man to let go as quickly as possible.  The closer to the truth a man might come, the more fractured or tremulous his identity; the defense mechanism, as Dr. Cawley calls it, becomes a tomb. 

Paranoia is never quite moored in reality, of course; part of its essence is free-floating fabulism, the obsessive capacity to look at things everyone sees in order to pick out patterns nobody sees.  Still, in any paranoid fantasy there remains, at bottom, a solid sense of what the world should be, “a moral order” as Teddy says.  It is precisely this which Solando says has gone from the world, and it’s what Teddy slowly loses.  In literal plot terms, the film swallows its hero’s ability to mount a counter-attack against the increasingly looming possibility that he will be imprisoned on the island.  The power on the island—the doctors and the guards—undermines resistance before it gets a foothold.  Shutter Island has a monstrous dark energy at its heart, and that is precisely how Teddy characterizes everyone on the island: he is a monster surrounded by monsters, finally prompting the question he asks Chuck at the end: “Is it better to live as a monster or die as a good man?” 

This is the scandalous question hidden away by the ideological narrative dominant since the middle of the twentieth century, when man’s atrocities outran his ability to face up to them.  (Incidentally, it’s no accident that Cawley’s discussion of the abusive methods of ‘curing’ patients, one of which sounds like waterboarding, echoes crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.)  Importantly, the story places an everyman, Teddy, in the clutches of an all-powerful authority.  But the authority is at war with itself.  On one side is the kindly Dr. Cawley, who believes in the sanctity of life and the ability of science to redeem the fallen, and on the other is the pessimist Dr. Naehring, backed by the brute muscle of the Warden and his Gestapo-like guards.  At the end of the movie, Naehring and the Warden appear victorious.  Teddy’s last, deliciously ambiguous line—the question he asks Chuck—doesn’t hint that Teddy might be sane after all, though that is a possible reading.  What Dr. Cawley’s defeat and Teddy’s question solidify is that in the island-world the only defense mechanism is insanity, and the only possible moral victory is suicide.  For all its superficial mystery elements, Scorsese has made a dark, eerily on-point allegory of America as a mega-security state full of helpless narcotized inmates, “The Matrix” re-cast as a twitchy Gothic thriller.