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The performances of the actors in Shutter Island make the film a great deal of fun to watch even with a full knowledge of how the whole thing is going to end. There's a subtlety to every performance here that doesn't make it into the prose of the original novel and makes the film quite a bit more fascinating. DiCaprio does a pretty good job of making the detective in question likeable enough. The passions and concerns of the patient are delicately rendered by DiCaprio. He's interesting to watch here, but it's even more interesting to watch there rest of the cast react to him.

Many of the rest of the characters are aware that DiCaprio is undergoing a complex form of treatment and the actors playing them do a brilliant job of casting just the right shadows over the edges of their performances that let you know that their characters know that there's something more going on here. Mark Ruffalo plays the detective's assistant with admirable precision. He's trying to help out the detective on a couple of different levels here and they're all pretty subtle. Ben Kingsley plays the psychologist at the facility who is administering the treatment. Kingsley manages to seem both a bit sinister and a bit compassionate as the plot runs its convolutions. There are a number of other really fascinating performances here as the treatment runs its course. Different people react in different ways to the idea of treating a potentially dangerous patient like a perfectly sane outside agent with enough authority over them to conduct an investigation into a disappearance that hasn't happened. Max von Sydow manages a level of both sympathy and disgust as a German doctor at the facility. Ted Levine makes a cheesy little monologue by the warden come across brilliantly as a warden escorting the detective back to civilization after he was found wandering around in a hurricane.

Scorsese and DP Robert Richardson give the film a depth and visual poetry that was never present in Lehane's relatively flat prose style. The production used an actual abandoned asylum from the era to stand-in for the island-based institution. The entire place was refurbished to look like a fully operating institution based on the designs of an architect of such structures from the era. Scorsese and company consulted an actual doctor who had worked on changing the old state-run mental institutions into more humane, modern facilities in the 1960s. The film is fantastic psychological horror, but there's a level of commitment to detail that gives the film a kind of integrity that it's difficult to feel from Lehane's original novel.


The Verdict

While Lehane's original novel had presented an interesting premise that was competently executed as pop fiction, the novel Shutter Island fails to deliver on any of the potential for greater depth that the premise poses. Filled with a kind of rich detail and subtlety not found in the uninspired prose of Lehane's novel, Scorsese's film has a kind of depth to it that is much more compelling. Complex depictions of characters by a very talented cast begin to delve into some of the avenues of the human psyche that Lehane so carelessly overlooked in the novel. In being reasonably faithful to the novel's plot, the film is unable to make-up for its shortcomings, but it comes a lot closer to realizing the potential of what is truly a very interesting premise.

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