Shutter Island

Finishing the trifecta of movies my friends showed me we have Martin Scorsese’s 2010 mystery/thriller Shutter Island. I decided to go full on spoiler-filled for this review, because it’s almost impossible to talk about the movie without discussing the plot. If you want to know, if the movie’s good – well yes, what would you expect. Based on a popular book, directed by one of the cinema’s most revered creators, with a allstar cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley – yeah it’s pretty good, great even if you like open endings. So you have my recommendation to watch it, but from now on I’m talking spoilers.

I was absolutely sold on the initial premise – two U. S. marshals come to an island prison to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner. Love it. It became clear very soon that that’s not what’s actually going on so we moved to „the island is a secret government lab, where they make brain experiments on people“ point of view. Liked it even more. And than it started getting weird. We get many trippy dream sequences and we learn about a man called Andrew Laeddis, who supposedly killed the wife of our protagonist Teddy Daniels. That’s when we take a visit to Ward C, where the most dangerous criminals are held and we experience an amazing horror scene with ingenious use of light, after witch Teddy talks to one of the prisoners who he thinks, he met out on the mainland. Their conversation is extremely strange and the first thing that really makes you wonder what the hell’s actually going on. After leaving Ward C Teddy wanders the island for a bit, meets the lost prisoner who’s revealed to be a doctor rather than a patient, loses his partner and goes to save him to the lighthouse, where the brain experiments are supposedly happening, where we get our big reveal.

Teddy actually is Andrew Laeddis and he killed his wife. That much I figured out before it happened. I didn’t connect the story about Rachel Solando drowning her three children with Andrew’s wife though. Most opinions I found would tell you that from there Andrew gets brought to reality and than decides he doesn’t want to live with his sins and essentially commits suicide by pretending he has gone mad again.

I personally am not sure that’s the case. I guess most clues point to this solution, but some directly oppose it. I definitely need to watch this movie again and pay close attention to the key moments, but I feel like some parts of Teddy’s conversation in Ward C just don’t add up. Why would DOPLNIT say that he’s back in that ward because of Teddy? In Andrew Laeddis’s world he never left it in the first place. Who the hell is the second Rachel Solando? She’s certainly not Andrew’s wife so where did she come from? Of course defending this position in an argument is almost impossible, because my opponent can always say that it was all a part of Laeddis’s delusion, that he crafted those events to maintain his fantasy and that’s really the problem with having an unreliable narrator like Teddy – we don’t know what actually happened and what didn’t so we’re left guessing. I’d say it’s also a large part of this story’s appeal though. You don’t know what happened, so you can choose the story that speaks to you – either the heroic tale of a U. S. marshals uncovering a government conspiracy or the tragic story of a person gone mad from the trauma he experienced, so I won’t tell which side you should choose, but I am gonna leave you with some food for thought – a question that still has me wondering whenever I think about it. We know that Teddy thinks the brain experiments are happening in the lighthouse, but we have seen inside the lighthouse in Andrew’s part of the story. It was a normal lighthouse, no brain experiments, nothing out of the ordinary. So why than, when Laeddis chooses to undergo a lobotomy, rather than live with his demons, does the camera show us the lighthouse as the final shot in the movie?