By Peter Covino
Entertainment Editor

Martin Scorsese has been making movies, some of them amongst the greatest ever made, for more than 40 years, but he has never made a film like Shutter Island.

This is not Scorsese's best, but even a film that falls perhaps a little short of his standard, is still watching a master at work.

Scorsese ventures back into Cape Fear territory here, which has never been one of my favorite

Scorsese film because that suspense movie just didn't need to be remade.
Part Hitchcock, part The Shining, and the rest all Scorsese, Shutter Island is a nightmare vision set in 1954, with Leonardo DiCaprio stuck inside The Snake Pit (a sort of vaguely similar film from 1948).

DiCaprio, who has become a Scorsese regular (The Departed, Aviator, Gangsters of New York) is U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels. He and new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have one tough assignment: to find a missing patient/prisoner on Shutter Island, a remote mental institution in Boston Harbor, accessible only by ferry.

Shutter Island is home to only the worst prisoners. Even though it is seemingly escape proof, the perimeter still has an electrified fence. It is sort of like Jurassic Park, only with humans.

Keeping the inmates in line are a pair of doctors (well played by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow.) You can't trust them for sure, but who can you trust on Shutter Island?

It is certainly hard to trust our “hero” Daniels. His own past keeps catching up with him, and he hallucinates or has horribly vivid nightmares on a regular basis, so it is pretty much impossible to tell what is real and what is fact. Daniels is a World War II veteran and he was there at one of the German concentration camps and saw the piles of bodies. Is it any wonder he takes an immediate dislike to one of  the head doctors (played by von Sydow) who still has a detectable German accent? There is more fuel to Daniels' fire: his own wife was killed a few year's earlier by an arsonist. And as Daniel's looks for the missing patient/prisoner, he also knows that the arsonist is very likely housed on Shutter Island as well.

It doesn't take very long before Daniels discovers, he and his partner are not very welcome on the island. The more he investigates, the more he realizes something is very wrong here. Getting the occasional clue from the mental patient/prisoners, the doctors are hiding something. Could this place really be the home of new Nazi experiments, via that German doctor? Or is it something even worse?

Scorsese isn't about to let you escape, or his protagonist either.

And as Daniels decides maybe he and his partner should take the morning ferry back to the mainland, a appropriately menacing storm gets only worse, and there is no escape.

Nightmares, ghosts, menacing patients, no lights, dark corners — Scorsese has this and more in his bag of tricks, as he plays with your mind as only a master can. You know something is very wrong, but just what exactly?

As the cinematic noose gets tighter around Daniels neck, who can you turn too? It's like being stuck in Hitchcock's Spellbound or on top of the tower in Vertigo with a severe fear of heights.
Scorsese looks like he had a great time creating this suspense/thriller and you will enoy your stay as well.

Critic's rating: B+
Rated R