Saturday, October 29, 2022

REVIEW: Shutter Island (live action movie)

Shutter Island is a historical psychological thriller based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This takes place in 1954. U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule travel to Shutter Island, the site of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane. They've been sent there to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, a woman who ended up at Ashecliffe after drowning her three children.

Teddy has an additional goal: finding Andrew Laeddis, who he suspects is an unreported extra patient at the hospital. Laeddis was responsible for Teddy's wife's death in a fire, and although he swears to Chuck that he isn't planning to kill Laeddis if he can manage to find him, it seems doubtful that he's telling the truth.

Various details, as well as the somewhat "off" behavior of several of the hospital staff and patients, lead Teddy to believe that the head of the hospital, psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley, is hiding things, and he's determined to get to the bottom of it all. But in a place like Shutter Island, is there anyone, even himself, that he can really trust?

This movie took me two days to get through. It wasn't bad, necessarily, but it took a while to grab my attention. I was uninterested in Teddy and his hallucinations about his wife. Those two needed to get a room, which is a weird thing to have to say considering that she was technically dead.

The story picked up as Teddy gained more and more reasons to doubt the motives of everyone around him, but when the biggest twists were finally revealed, my reaction was something along the lines of "that's it?" I kept waiting for something else to be revealed, but no, that really was it. The setup was...a pretty big stretch. I did think, however, that Teddy's final line was excellent and chilling.

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