Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 6 August

Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010)

Based on a nov­el by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone), Shutter Island is one of the easi­est recom­mend­a­tions I’ve ever made here. 

I wrote about it back in March 2010 for the late, lamen­ted, Capital Times:

There’s some­thing very odd about the open­ing scenes in Shutter Island and it takes the entire film for you to put your fin­ger on it. Shots don’t match between cuts, there’s a stil­ted qual­ity to the dia­logue (too much expos­i­tion for a Martin Scorsese movie) and the pacing is off. For a while I found myself won­der­ing wheth­er Marty had lost the immense influ­ence of his great edit­or Thelma Schoonmaker, but there she is, still in the cred­its, as she has been for Scorsese since Raging Bull.

Several years ago, Scorsese played a prac­tic­al joke on me (per­son­ally, it felt like at the time) when an entire reel of The Aviator was treated to look like faded 1930s Technicolor – I went to the Embassy counter to com­plain and felt very sheep­ish to be told by Oscar, the pro­jec­tion­ist, that the dir­ect­or meant it that way. So, this time around I decided to trust the maes­tro and roll with the strange­ness and was rewar­ded with one of the best (and cleverest) psy­cho­lo­gic­al thrillers in many a year.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a washed-up Federal Marshall, sent to the off­shore Massachusetts booby hatch at Shutter Island to invest­ig­ate the mys­ter­i­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of a woman patient. He is assigned a new part­ner (Mark Ruffalo) and, trapped there by a storm, they start to dis­cov­er some ter­rible secrets about the facil­ity and its creepy staff, led by Ben Kingsley and the always excel­lent value Max von Sydow.

Scorsese isn’t par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in the super­nat­ur­al and so doesn’t do tra­di­tion­al hor­ror films. He is much more inter­ested in what hap­pens to human psy­cho­logy under duress and, to that end, Shutter Island is as per­son­al a work as he has pro­duced since Bringing Out the Dead more than ten years ago.

Also reviewed in that excel­lent Capital Times column: Jane Campion’s won­der­ful Bright Star, a Hugh Grant low point, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, “little gem of a com­edy” Masquerades from Algeria, the 3D remas­ter of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 and Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-wining per­form­ance in Crazy Heart.

Where to watch Shutter Island

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on Stan

Canada: Streaming on Paramount+

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Prime Video

India: Streaming on Prime Video or HotStar

USA: Streaming on Paramount+ or Fubo