Shutter Island (2010)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
World War II soldier-turned-U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by troubling visions and a mysterious doctor.
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71 films that influenced Shutter Island
What critics say influenced Shutter Island
Watching it, movie references pile up inside your brain: Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor is in there, certainly, and the cheapo tone poems of the B-movie master Val Lewton.
Grad-level geeks will also recognize the references to Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.
It's also an homage to Shock Corridor, a film made by one of his idols, Sam Fuller.
With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt: not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”
For this distinction, Scorsese hardly needed to have directed Shutter Island, his first movie to fully institutionalize this conditionâ??or, if you prefer, his first to wrestle with the psychoanalytic and insane asylum subgenres, within which Samuel Fullerâ??s Shock Corridor is but the most obvious entry.
In Samuel Fuller 's "Shock Corridor" (1963), an obvious influence on "Shutter Island," the reporter's lover tells him he's crazy to enter the asylum in the name of a good story.
He borrows liberally from film noir and conventional horror, synthesizing a result that at times recalls the way in which Stanley Kubrick approached The Shining .
Unsure of what kind of film it wants to be?if Scorsese was out to scare in the same way Stanley Kubrick did with 1980's " The Shining ," he has failed miserably?"Shutter…
It reminds a great deal, in fact, of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining , in that there's definitely something there, but what that something might be has very little conversation with what might have been.
I appreciate the comment about Kubrick’s The Shining being a significant point of reference, and the mention of Geoffery Cock’s thesis about the film’s subtext being rooted in the holocaust.
The movie plays like a loopy fever-dream Scorsese had after a marathon of Hitchcocks Vertigo, Val Lewtons Bedlam, Kubricks The Shining, and William Peter Blattys The Ninth Configuration.
Indeed, acting more Kubrickian than ever, the director (who also co-produced the film) uses the promise of horrorâ??of another Cape Fear, reallyâ??to subvert expectations as thoroughly as did The Shining, wherein Kubrick offered nothing terribly supernatural besides the twin horrors of parenthood and writerâ??s block.
Artifice is part of the references that Scorsese makes to movies from the past -- e.g., Vertigo (1958), The Snake Pit (1948) -- but his use of artifice is more artificial than effective.
Another film Scorsese showed his cast was Hitchcock's " Vertigo ," and we sense echoes of its hero's fear of heights.
It's not merely that Scorsese understands Hitchcock's ideas about point of view and audience sympathy; his visual-style touchstone is "Vertigo," particularly James Stewart's breakdown sequence.
The movie plays like a loopy fever-dream Scorsese had after a marathon of Hitchcocks Vertigo, Val Lewtons Bedlam, Kubricks The Shining, and William Peter Blattys The Ninth Configuration.
Something of a departure for Scorsese, Shutter Island is his tilt into Alfred Hitchcock territory - it's a deftly plotted genre mash-up with shades of Vertigo, classic noir Laura and Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor (as Scorsese himself admits).
But its spiral staircaseâ??albeit functioning like Vertigoâ??s and credited by Scorsese to the one in The Red Shoesâ??surely does.
There are echoes of a number of noir films—especially the post-war ones with their added aura of disillusionment—and there’s a lot of Hitchcock on display, from Spellbound (1945) to Vertigo.
Most obviously, Shutter Island has a shower scene like Psycho, a haunted-stairway scene like Vertigo, tweedy shrinks sipping brandy as in Spellbound, and a rock-climbing cliffhanger like North by Northwest.
It is a dazzling pastiche of a Hollywood movie of the 1940s and 50s, part Gothic horror in the Val Lewton mode of Bedlam and Isle of the Dead and part noir- thriller in the psychiatric cycle that stretches from Hitchcock's Spellbound to Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, complete with the obligatory dream sequences, expressionist gestures, throbbing undercurrents of guilt and anxiety and bold narrative twists.
But it is a film that, like Psycho (to which it inevitably nods at one point), we will need to revisit before making a proper assessment.
Most obviously, Shutter Island has a shower scene like Psycho, a haunted-stairway scene like Vertigo, tweedy shrinks sipping brandy as in Spellbound, and a rock-climbing cliffhanger like North by Northwest.
A climactic scene in which Kingsley reveals all is a bit of a letdown — but even Hitchcock himself was not immune to the “Johnny the Explainer” trap, as Psycho proves.
If you thought the psychiatrist's explanation in "Psycho" was long, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
As was the case with Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo,’’ Anthony Perkins in “Psycho,’’ and Tippi Hedren in “Marnie,’’ the more crucial matter is Teddy’s increasingly unsteady state of mind.
In a movie that for the most part is pretty grim, Scorsese's occasional Hitchcock flourishes — the rear-projection backgrounds in some of the outdoor scenes, the lighthouse looming up like the windmill in "Foreign Correspondent" — provide welcome amusement.
As was the case with Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo,’’ Anthony Perkins in “Psycho,’’ and Tippi Hedren in “Marnie,’’ the more crucial matter is Teddy’s increasingly unsteady state of mind.
Most obviously, Shutter Island has a shower scene like Psycho, a haunted-stairway scene like Vertigo, tweedy shrinks sipping brandy as in Spellbound, and a rock-climbing cliffhanger like North by Northwest.
Scorsese showed his actors the great 1947 noir " Out of the Past ," whose very title is a noir theme: Characters never arrive at a story without baggage.
It’s fun, in a film-school kind of way, to pick out the references: “Out of the Past,” “Laura,” “Isle of the Dead,” and so forth.
So it was that, armed with recent viewings of classic noir films of obsession like Laura, Crossfire, and Out of the Past—cut with yellow-journalist gut-punches like Shock Corridor and revelatory documentaries like Titicut Follies for verisimilitude—Scorsese took Dennis Lehane’s B-flick-inspired novel Shutter Island and made a real monster of a film.
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Artifice is part of the references that Scorsese makes to movies from the past -- e.g., Vertigo (1958), The Snake Pit (1948) -- but his use of artifice is more artificial than effective.
With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt: not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”
There have been a few like The Snake Pit and Bedlam.
Almost immediately, they are confronted by gothic horrors inspired by Titicut Follies and plunged into a Thorazine nightmare that fishes for logic with a red herring on the end of every hook.
It ends with a title-card reassurance that asylum â??reforms were begun in 1773,â?? and that its hospital has since â??led the way to enlightened and sensible treatment of the mentally ill.â?? (In another two decades, Frederick Wisemanâ??s lacerating Titicut Follies would verily beg to differ.)
By comparison or not?and, admittedly, there are too many similarities with " Session 9 " to ignore?"Shutter Island" is a handsomely produced, well-acted folly that, come to think of it, also makes the frustrated viewer long to be watching 1967's riveting mental institution documentary "Titicut Follies," instead.
So it was that, armed with recent viewings of classic noir films of obsession like Laura, Crossfire, and Out of the Past—cut with yellow-journalist gut-punches like Shock Corridor and revelatory documentaries like Titicut Follies for verisimilitude—Scorsese took Dennis Lehane’s B-flick-inspired novel Shutter Island and made a real monster of a film.
In the last couple of years, Scorsese has paid public tribute to famed 1940 low-budget horror producer Val Lewton (the man behind such classics as “The Cat People” and “The Leopard Man”) by producing a documentary examining his life and work and to Italian cult director Mario Bava (“Black Sunday,” “Black Sabbath,” “Twitch of the Death Nerve”) by penning an introduction to author Tim Lucas’ mammoth biography on the man and with this film, he has found the ideal vehicle to celebrate their work in purely cinematic terms.
In the last couple of years, Scorsese has paid public tribute to famed 1940 low-budget horror producer Val Lewton (the man behind such classics as “The Cat People” and “The Leopard Man”) by producing a documentary examining his life and work and to Italian cult director Mario Bava (“Black Sunday,” “Black Sabbath,” “Twitch of the Death Nerve”) by penning an introduction to author Tim Lucas’ mammoth biography on the man and with this film, he has found the ideal vehicle to celebrate their work in purely cinematic terms.
"Pull yourself together, Teddy," he tells himself, looking in the mirror after retching in the toilet bowl, a scene reminiscent of the opening of the 1948 noir classic The Bribe, which is also set on an isolated island battered by a storm.
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Grad-level geeks will also recognize the references to Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.
It’s fun, in a film-school kind of way, to pick out the references: “Out of the Past,” “Laura,” “Isle of the Dead,” and so forth.
It is a dazzling pastiche of a Hollywood movie of the 1940s and 50s, part Gothic horror in the Val Lewton mode of Bedlam and Isle of the Dead and part noir- thriller in the psychiatric cycle that stretches from Hitchcock's Spellbound to Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, complete with the obligatory dream sequences, expressionist gestures, throbbing undercurrents of guilt and anxiety and bold narrative twists.
The movie plays like a loopy fever-dream Scorsese had after a marathon of Hitchcocks Vertigo, Val Lewtons Bedlam, Kubricks The Shining, and William Peter Blattys The Ninth Configuration.
There is, in his performance, a touch of the amused relish that was shown by Boris Karloff, when he, too, oversaw an asylum, in “Bedlam,” the Val Lewton chiller of 1946.
So while Shutter Islandâ??s official sources, some screened for its cast and crew, include Shock Corridor and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the deeper onesâ??still within B-movie noir and German Expressionismâ??include Lewtonâ??s Bedlam (1946) and G.W. Pabstâ??s pioneering Secrets of a Soul (1926).
Karloff commanded the screen in Val Lewton's shocking story of insanity, Bedlam, several years later.
Part of the central premise—with behavior that only makes sense at the end—may even owe a debt to Roland West’s The Bat Whispers (1930).