Great filmmakers often do some of their best work—or their most interesting work, at any rate—when they seem at a glance to be slumming. Freed of any commitment to respectability, they can indulge, say, their penchant for visual expressionism, employing a palette so intense that it would be in grave danger of overwhelming a more grounded and plausible narrative. Certainly that’s the main attraction of Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese’s almost operatically moody adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s psychodramatic potboiler novel. The story turns out to be pulp silliness incarnate, culminating in a Big Reveal that alert viewers will already have guessed halfway through the picture. But it’s hard to complain much about the banal destination when the journey is so spectacularly evocative. Not since Kundun, his little-seen Dalai Lama biopic, has Scorsese conjured up such a nonstop succession of striking, unforgettable images.

The Details

Shutter Island

Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley.

Directed by Martin Scorsese.

Rated R. Opens Friday.

Beyond the Weekly

Shutter Island

IMDb: Shutter Island

Rotten Tomatoes: Shutter Island

Granted, Lehane’s novel provides him with a terrific setting. The year is 1954, and two U.S. marshals—Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo)—have just arrived on Shutter Island, a forbidding, perpetually wave-bashed hunk of rock in the middle of Boston Harbor that’s home to Ashecliffe, an asylum for the criminally insane. One of Ashecliffe’s inmates, a delusional woman in denial about having murdered her three young children, has mysteriously gone missing, by all reports having simply disappeared from a locked cell; it’s impossible to leave the island except by ferry, yet no trace of her can be found anywhere. But somehow this doesn’t seem to worry the asylum’s chief administrator (Ben Kingsley), who seems oddly reluctant to help Teddy and Chuck with their investigation. And the longer they shuttle around Shutter Island—trapped, after the first day, by hurricane-level wind and rain—the more evidence they uncover that it holds an unspeakably dark secret.

As I said, that secret isn’t terribly difficult to guess, and one could argue that neither Scorsese nor screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis is trying especially hard to obscure it. Instead, they turn Teddy’s search for the truth into an extraordinary fever dream, in which disturbing remnants of his past—his shameful part in the liberation of Dachau; his wife’s death at the hands of an arsonist—burst onscreen at regular intervals in a riot of nightmare imagery. The dead wife appears to Teddy in a rain of ash, whispering warnings. SS kapos, riddled with American bullets, fall left to right in a grisly chorus line. Are these memories clues, or are they pharmacological side effects? And could any island or institution be this oppressively ominous, or are we seeing a landscape of the mind? Even the doctors’ cigarette smoke forms an impenetrable shroud.

In a way, Shutter Island became even more hypnotic after I figured out what must be going on, metamorphosing from an outlandish thriller into an indelible character study. (One performance in particular, which seems almost stridently bizarre at the outset, becomes remarkably canny once the pieces fall into place.) So it’s a shame about the expository third act, which places undue emphasis on the silly narrative by spelling everything out in detail so laborious that at one point it actually involves words written on a blackboard. I’d hoped for something a little more ambiguous. Still, if only more big-budget Hollywood movies boasted even a fraction of this one’s grandiose recklessness (reflected even in its score, derived mostly from avant-garde composers like Krzysztof Penderecki). The Departed may be the better movie overall, but Shutter Island, prioritizing mood and imagery over everything else, makes for superior cinema.