okay I need to talk about shutter island (2010) because scorsese was genuinely not okay when he made this and i have receipts
So I just finished rewatching shutter island for my film studies class and i've been sitting in my room in the dark for like twenty minutes just processing because this movie is so much more layered than I remembered and I need to get all of this out of my head before 8am tomorrow.
let me just start by saying martin scorsese is a director who has spent his entire career studying obsession. goodfellas is about a man obsessed with life. taxi driver is about a man obsessed with his own moral mission. The Departed is about men so obsessed with their roles they forget who they actually are. and then you get to shutter island and it's like he took all of that the identity crisis, the moral rot, the unreliable narrator and folded it into a psychological horror film that is actually, at its core, a story about a man who loved his wife so much that losing her broke his mind completely. and he just. chose to make a genre film out of it. incredible.
The anagram thing and why it matters more than people give it credit for
okay so for anyone who somehow doesn't know: the main character's name is Edward "Teddy" Daniels. and his imaginary partner's name is Chuck Aule. and when you rearrange those letters you get Andrew Laeddis and Rachel Solando. his real name, and the name of the patient he invented as a reason to come to the island.
But here's what I think gets overlooked about this: the anagram isn't just a clever easter egg for the audience. it's a clue about the architecture of his delusion. his mind didn't randomly construct these fake identities it used the same raw material. the same letters. it couldn't fully escape itself even when it was trying to. andrew laeddis literally could not hide from his own name. His subconscious kept the letters, shuffled them around, and handed them back to him in a different order as if that would be enough.
That detail alone tells you everything about how the film understands trauma. you don't escape it. you rearrange it.
The beginning of the film and why teddy is seasick
This is the detail that wrecked me on rewatch and I can't believe I didn't catch it the first time.
The movie opens on the ferry. Teddy is leaning over a sink, nauseous, seasick, looking genuinely terrible. and Chuck, who we later learn is actually his doctor, Dr. Sheehan, playing along with the role-play seems completely fine. Standing there relaxed, not a hint of discomfort.
We're supposed to read this as a character quirk. oh, Teddy gets seasick. cute. moving on.
But here's the thing: Teddy is not seasick. teddy is withdrawing. He's a patient at ashecliffe who has been taken off his psychiatric medication so that the elaborate role-play therapy can work so he can experience his delusion fully and hopefully break through it himself. his body is reacting to the sudden withdrawal from antipsychotics and whatever else they had him on. the nausea is real. the physical distress is real. It's just not from the ocean.
And his suit the clothes he wears are slightly too big for him. They hang a little. they don't quite fit the way a man's own clothes would fit. because they're not his. They were given to him to wear as part of the costume of the character "teddy daniels." He's a patient dressed up in a prop to play out his own fantasy. and scorsese puts that right there in frame in the opening minutes and we just. don't see it because we're not looking for it yet.
that's mise en scène doing the work that dialogue would ruin. the costume is wrong. the body is sick. the setting is theatrical everything is telling us this is a performance, and we walk right past it.
what scorsese does with mise en scène throughout the film
let's actually talk about this properly because i feel like the direction gets undersold whenever people discuss shutter island.
scorsese and cinematographer robert richardson shoot this film in a way that is constantly, almost aggressively expressionistic. the color palette shifts depending on whose reality we're inhabiting. the "real" ashecliffe the institution, the corridors, the doctors' offices is shot in cold blues and clinical grays. but the moment we enter teddy's dream sequences or flashbacks, everything goes warm and oversaturated. the colors are almost too beautiful. his dead wife dolores appears in golden light, wearing warm reds, surrounded by this soft haze. she looks like a memory because she is one. she looks too perfect because she is his idealized reconstruction of her.
The fire imagery is constant and it's never subtle but it earns being heavy-handed because it's building a specific emotional logic. fire is how dolores died in teddy's constructed memory he believes she was killed by andrew laeddis in a fire. but fire is also how she actually died, except in reality dolores was the one who drowned their children and teddy was the one who shot her. fire as destruction, fire as guilt, fire as the thing he keeps approaching and flinching away from it runs through the whole film and the expressionist color work reinforces it at every turn.
Then there's the use of space and architecture. the island itself is genuinely shot to feel like it's closing in. The corridors of ashecliffe get narrower as the film progresses. the cliffs get higher. The geography feels wrong in a way you can't quite name, which is exactly right, because the geography is being processed through the perception of a man whose mind is working very hard to maintain a fiction. scorsese blocks scenes so that teddy is constantly slightly off-center, slightly too far from exits, slightly hemmed in by people who are watching him. and we feel it as the audience before we understand why.
compare this to goodfellas, where scorsese uses that famous long take through the copacabana to make henry hill feel untouchable, invincible, at the center of his own universe. The camera is seduced by henry the same way the audience is meant to be. in shutter island, the camera is cautious around teddy. it watches him. it gives him space it then slowly removes. It's the same director using the same tools in exactly the opposite emotional direction.
the wife, the depression, the children, and what the film is actually about
Dolores chanal teddy's wife had severe undiagnosed depression. In the real timeline, this went untreated and unaddressed and she drowned their three children in the lake behind their house. and andrew laeddis, who is teddy, who is the man at the center of this film, came home and found them. and then he shot his wife. and his mind could not survive that. could not hold both things at once that he loved her, that she did this, that he did what he did next and so it built him a new story.
In the new story, he is teddy daniels, a heroic federal marshal. his wife was murdered by a man named andrew laeddis (himself, externalized, made into a villain he could chase rather than a thing he had done). his children don't exist in this version. The grief is still there, it's always there, leaking through the seams of the delusion but it's been rerouted. given a shape he can fight instead of one he has to sit with.
The film is not really a mystery thriller. it's a grief film. it's a film about what happens when the truth of what you've lost and what you've done is simply too large to exist inside a human consciousness without destroying it. the institution, the doctors, the whole elaborate role-play therapy it exists because andrew/teddy had already been through this before, had already been told the truth, and had retreated back into the delusion because the real world was unlivable. they are trying again. the whole movie is one more attempt.
and the ending that final line, "which would be worse: to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?" is teddy choosing. He has had the breakthrough. He knows who he is. and he chooses, in the space of one quiet conversation, to go back. to walk into the lobotomy knowing what it is. because living with the truth of what happened is not something he can do. and scorsese frames this not as defeat and not as victory but as something achingly, devastatingly human. a man choosing the version of himself that can bear to exist.
The foreshadowing and how many times the film tells you what it is
On my rewatch this movie is absolutely covered in fingerprints of what it's actually doing and I need to list some of them.
In the very first shot of dolores in the dream sequence she is wet. she is dripping water. and she crumbles to ash in teddy's arms. water and ash. she drowned the children. she died by fire. both things are in the very first image we see of her. it's right there.
every interaction teddy has with dr. cawley is framed, in retrospect, as a conversation between a doctor and his patient. cawley is never flustered by teddy's accusations. He's never actually defensive. He responds to everything with this particular kind of patient, measured attention that reads as institutional calm rather than innocence, and we miss it completely the first time because we're reading him as a suspect.
The warden, who in the film's logic represents some dark part of andrew's own psyche tells teddy early on that "god loves violence." it's a strange, startling line and it's meant to feel like a non sequitur. but it's andrew's own guilt speaking to him. the warden is the part of him that knows what he did to dolores. and he's been carrying that knowledge around the whole film.
Dr. Jeremiah Naehring, the other psychiatrist, essentially diagnoses teddy to his face within the first half hour. he talks about men of violence who develop a code of justice to justify their impulses. teddy gets defensive and dismisses it as manipulation. but naehring isn't trying to crack him, he's observing him. and he's right about everything.
The children in teddy's visions are always silent or just out of reach. because he doesn't fully remember them. they are the part of the trauma that is most buried. dolores appears repeatedly and vividly because the guilt of her death is what drives the whole delusion, but the children flicker. they're half-formed. they're the wound underneath the wound.
Scorsese's filmography and where this fits
I think shutter island is a genuinely underappreciated film in scorsese's body of work and part of the reason is that it came out right after the departed, which won him the oscar, and people had very specific expectations of what "a scorsese film" was supposed to be at that point. gritty. masculine. dialogue-driven. crime-adjacent and instead he made this lush, operatic, almost melodramatic psychological horror film with a bernard herrmann-style score (actually drawing heavily on existing twentieth century classical music, which is such a specific choice ligeti, pärt, john cage music that feels like it's happening inside a collapsing mind) and people didn't quite know what to do with it but look at his career honestly. taxi driver is a film about a man who constructs a heroic narrative around himself to avoid confronting his own alienation and violence. raging bull is about a man who cannot separate love from destruction and ruins everything he touches. cape fear is about the return of repressed violence and guilt. the aviator is about a brilliant mind consumed by its own mechanisms of self-protection.
Shutter island is all of those films. it's scorsese returning to every theme he's spent decades exploring and compressing them into one man on one island. The unreliable narrator of the taxi driver. the self-destruction of a raging bull. the gothic dread of cape fear. the mental deterioration of the aviator. it's a synthesis film. it just happens to look like a genre picture on the surface.
The difference is that where those earlier films often maintained a certain ironic distance we watch henry hill and we know scorsese knows henry is deluded, we watch travis bickle and we know scorsese knows he's dangerous shutter island puts us fully inside the delusion. We are not observers of andrew laeddis. we are andrew laeddis for two hours. we are wrong about everything alongside him. and that is a fundamentally different and more uncomfortable relationship for the audience to have.
I have a paper due thursday and i've spent three hours writing this instead and i don't even regret it. shutter island is a film about grief and the stories we tell ourselves to survive it and the way those stories can become their own kind of prison. it's about a man who loved a woman who was sick and who failed her and who could not live inside that failure. it's about medicine and ethics and what it means to treat someone who has made their delusion into a home. and it's also a masterclass in how to use every single element of filmmaking costume, color, sound, space, performance, score, framing to make the audience experience rather than observe a broken mind.
Scorsese was 67 when he made this movie. He has been making films since the 1960s. and he made something this formally daring and emotionally gutting at that point in his career and people kind of filed it under "pretty good thriller" and moved on. The disrespect is immense and I will be thinking about those slightly-too-large clothes on a sick man on a ferry for the rest of the semester at minimum.
