I can’t say I walked away from Shutter Island disappointed, and I can’t say I was blown away.  It’s a very similar feeling I had walking away from the Departed, it’s not like there’s any well defined moral to the story, it’s just a story. I think what Scorsese is trying to accomplish is to allow the audience to make up their own mind on the characters, rather than spelling out for them ‘this is who’s bad, and this is who’s good,’ and I can totally appreciate that.

We follow the main character, Teddy, a federal marshall, who has been assigned to an apparent disappearance of an inmate on “SHUTTER ISLAND” an island penitentiary for the criminally insane. Upon arrival Teddy and his partner are stonewalled by the staff and doctors at the facility, and we’re left to believe something fishy is going on that they’re all hiding. Teddy is simultaneously plagued by migraines and nightmares we assume were triggered by the boat ride to the island and a traumatized past including witnessing the aftermath of a holocaust concentration camp. As time moves on, and the plot thickens we eventually find out Teddy’s wife was killed by a deranged arson, who is supposedly an inmate on Shutter Island, and his real motive is that of revenge. The closer he gets to the his goal the more vivid and strange his hallucinations become, and we’re left to wonder if he is actually going crazy, or if the aspirin he’s taking to treat his migraines is actually a psychotropic hallucinogen designed to cripple his investigation.

Shutter Island does a very good job providing sufficient clues to guess the twist before it’s revealed, while still maintaining the ambiguity needed to keep the mystery going. When the twist is finally revealed it tops off the story in a very satisfying way, but I can picture some people being disappointed with the dark ending.

Between the graphic flashbacks of the holocaust, the firing squad execution of a LONG line of Nazis, brief full frontal male nudity of a cell full of inmates, and a good deal of gore, not to mention the casual ‘eff bomb’, Shutter Island hands down earns its R-Rating.

This is one I might watch one more time as a rental, but I don’t see myself buying the DVD. It was an overall good movie, but there just enough mature content to tip the scale away from interesting toward unpleasant.