Movie Trailer Review: Shutter Island

Opens: October 2, 2009

Website: Official Shutter Island site

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Jackie Earle Haley

My Review: After Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed, we’re all in agreement that Martin Scorsese and Leonard DiCaprio make excellent movies together, right? The two men team up together again for Shutter Island, and it’s this collaboration alone that makes me at all interested in a movie that looks like it will scare the crap out of me.

I’ve never been a huge fan of scary movies, with a few key exceptions (Silence of the Lambs still manages to enthrall and horrify me). In Shutter Island, DiCaprio is a US Marshall (utilizing the same lowbrow Boston accent he had in The Departed) who with his partner (Ruffalo) is investigating the disappearance of a patient at the dilapidated Shutter Island mental hospital in the 1950s. The missing woman appears to have completely vanished, and as the two men’s investigation digs deeper into the bizarre world of Shutter Island, horrible things begin to happen and it begins to look unlikely that they’ll ever be permitted to leave the island.

On the surface, it seems like run of the mill stuff: Man goes to “haunted” asylum, man goes crazy, man becomes prisoner himself. But I’m willing to give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt, as I’m sure he has something much more than that in store for us. Plus I have a strange sort of fascination with the mental hospitals of years gone by; they were inhumane, sadistic, torturous, and scariest of all, completely real. The sort of horrors that those who were deemed “insane” used to go through trump any supernatural or otherworldly thriller you can name, and in the hands of DiCaprio and Scorsese, I’m intrigued to see what Shutter Island has to offer.

Would I Pay For It?: Barring any truly horrible preview reviews, there’s a good chance I’ll go see this in the theater. At the very least, it’ll definitely make its way to my Netflix queue, if only to avoid the increasingly annoying trend of people bringing their babies to my movie theater. Can’t you check that thing at the door along with your coat?