Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are federal marshals investigating the escape of insane murderess Rachel Solando from a heavily-guarded mental facility off the coast of Massachusetts. The asylum, situated within a fortress built during the Civil War, is imposing from its façade, but gets more freakish once the interior and its inhabitants are exposed.Daniels’ investigation is impeded by the administrators of the facility who view the escape as an internal matter. Psychiatrists John Cawley (the ubiquitous Ben Kingsley) and Jeremiah Naehring (the quintessential Nazi — Swedish star Max von Sydow) head the asylum and would prefer not to be pestered by overeager cops.”Shutter Island,” directed by Martin Scorsese (his first film since his Oscar-winning “The Departed,” in 2006), is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (best-selling author of “Mystic River”).With “Shutter Island,” Scorsese is working within the gothic-horror, film-noir genres. The picturesque location of the asylum surrounded by a forbidding forest, the loud, discordant music (especially at the beginning), the suffocating confines of the caverns and the spooky characters — both sane and insane — all contribute in establishing an unsettling ambience for the audience. While the plot proceeds linearly, crucial information is withheld, so the audience exchanges position with Daniels. From expecting to solve a mystery, it suddenly dawns on us we might be prey in a chase — the scenario resembles a chess game played on a mutating jigsaw puzzle. At a point, Daniels gets lost in a dungeon overrun by escaping criminals; what’s most scary is not the manic protestations by inmate George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley), but rather matchsticks being lit. This mirrors the human heart: We are terrified less by what is hidden in its dark recesses and more by what could be exposed in the light.What “Shutter Island” shows best is the power of cinema to tamper with the structure of time and space. This is not to say all films are narrative in structure, but rather that one cannot be sure where narrative springs from in movies. For instance, are the events bubbles of Daniels’ imagination? Do the scenarios occur through Daniels’ actions, or regardless of them? Is the story being told Daniels’ or Scorsese’s? Cinema’s history is replete with narratives that fiddle with reality. Disparate examples include Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Caligari,” Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor” and Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects.” Each of these films, among countless others, challenges our firm belief in what is real or truthful. Granted, fiction also has the same potential to open us to these queries; it is less successful than film because we are conditioned to believe what we see more than what we read. The camera doesn’t lie, after all; to most of us, only the sensible, the rational, the visible, the comprehensible can be real.Scorsese is at his weakest when tying loose ends. Once we reach the conclusion of “Shutter Island” and get expositions explaining the entire film, the exercise proves disappointing because it conforms to our expected version of the truth. Which is why when a character pleads for another “to accept reality,” we can only assume the comment to be ironic. No mad man would claim to be mad; and if there was, why should anyone believe him?As a filmmaker who came of age in the ’70s, Scorsese is steeped in cinema’s extensive tradition. With “Shutter Island,” he has a film of fluctuating quality, alternating between razor-sharp visuals and distended plot. In the end, the film is neither a resurgence of a spent master nor the  decline of an established auteur, but rather a celebration of the visual medium itself, an aesthetic toast to narrative and its ability to refract reality in its own image.Freke Ette is a political theory graduate student from Uyo, Nigeria. You can follow him on Twitter @TDR_fette.
 
 
 
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