Shutter Island

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley. Directed by Martin Scorsese. R16

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As a dark and deceptive psychological noir thriller, Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's 2003 novel Shutter Island is a tortuously twisting, challenging descent into madness.

It's filled with nightmares, hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, guilt, grief and traumatic memories – some obvious in what they are, others not so clear or mystifying.

Leonardo DiCaprio gives yet another superb performance as troubled federal agent Teddy Daniels, who in 1954 with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) goes to Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliffe mental hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a murderous inmate.

Chief psychiatrist Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley) – who, unlike his colleague Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow), tries to treat patients without drugs or resorting to lobotomy – tells Teddy that the missing patient, Rachel Solando, drowned her three children but has created a fantasy to replace the prison.

But Teddy himself has much on his mind, suffering from migraines and tormented by memories of being a soldier liberating the Dachau death camp, and recalling his wife Dolores Chanal (Michelle Williams) – who, he tells Chuck, died in a fire.

Teddy believes the firebug, Andrew Laemmis (Elias Koteas), is somewhere in the hospital. He also suspects that the hospital is carrying out covert, government-funded, Nazi-style experiments – and fears there could be a plot to prevent him from uncovering and exposing it by drugging him and even ultimately keeping him on the island.

Scorsese fuses all these elements into an increasingly demented story told from Teddy's perspective. The island, with its ominous Gothic atmosphere, is soon lashed by a severe storm, and the film, right from the start, features intentionally sinister and overly melodramatic music.

A top-notch supporting cast includes Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson, both as Rachel Solando, Jackie Earle Haley as a killer inmate, and Ted Levine and John Carroll Lynch as Ashecliffe's warden and deputy warden.

Readers of Lehane's book – movie versions have also been made of his Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone – should be fascinated to see how Scorsese brings it to life on the screen. While they will know its ultimate revelations, the film introduces one final clever twist not in the novel.

Those moviegoers new to Shutter Island must keep their wits about them – no easy task with a Hitchcockian lead character who's likened to a rat in a maze and whose own anguished state makes him an unreliable narrator – to best appreciate the outcome.

With the story including some disturbing scenes and inducing confusion and a sense of claustrophobic craziness, this is a tale in which sanity and lunacy blur, with Scorsese effectively placing us palpably in its vertigo of swirling delirium.

- © Fairfax NZ News