Scorsese's Psycho is a stylish, scary masterpiece

Shutter Island won't attract universally favourable reviews, but that is not because it is bad. It's just unusual, outrageous and made with a splendid disregard for 'refined' critical taste. Maybe it's unrefined of me, but I loved it.
It's a wonderfully inventive, visceral horror film, one of Scorsese's most enjoyable pictures, and right up there with Taxi Driver and GoodFellas as a waking nightmare. It's a thrill to see one of the world's finest directors returning to top form at the age of 67.

Murder and mystery: Leonardo Dicaprio and Ben Kingsley

It's as if, now Scorsese has finally won a Best Picture Oscar for The Departed, which I found polished but conventional, he can make the much more daring, idiosyncratic films he really wants to create.
It's 1954, and World War II veteran and U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (a jowly and suddenly mature  Leonardo Dicaprio) travels with his deferential new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) across Boston Harbour to the rugged and sinister Shutter Island.

 They're on their way to Ashcliffe Hospital, based in an austere Civil War fortress. It now serves as a jail for 66 of the most dangerously insane prisoners in America. Teddy and Chuck are investigating the disappearance from her cell of Rachel Solando, a multiple child-killer who leaves behind a cryptic note suggesting there is a 67th prisoner somewhere in the facility.
As a hurricane confines the marshals to the island, it becomes evident that Teddy and Chuck are receiving less than whole-hearted co-operation from the strenuously polite doctor running the facility (Ben Kingsley) and his spooky, German-accented colleague (Max von Sydow).

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It doesn't inspire confidence that the warden is played by Ted Levine, who was serial-killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence Of The Lambs, and his deputy is the equally menacing John Carroll Lynch, chief suspect in another memorable serial-killer movie, Zodiac.
Like many a tough-guy noir detective before him, Teddy is a former alcoholic with a short temper, and none-too-impressed when people refuse to tell him the truth. Teddy's a widower plagued by memories of his beloved wife (Michelle Williams) and flashbacks to his traumatic experiences as a soldier liberating the concentration camp at Dachau. He suspects more and more that the island is the scene of Nazi-style experimentation on prisoners.
Teddy has a series of meetings with nightmarish characters, expertly played by (among others) Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley and Elias Koteas, which persuade him that the authorities will stop at nothing to prevent him from uncovering the truth. Every scene is superbly written by Laeta Kalogridis, who has done a sensational job of adapting the complex novel by Dennis Lehane, also responsible for Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone.
From the earliest moment of a ferry appearing out of fog, Scorsese creates a sense of creeping unease, helped by one of the most terrifying scores I have heard, put together by Robbie Robertson.
Production designer Dante Ferretti turns Shutter Island into the most frightening environment since the hotel in The Shining. Scorsese, with the help of cinematographer Robert Richardson and veteran editor Thelma Schoonmaker, plays with our sense of geography and scale to keep us discombobulated.
One reason some people won't like this film is that it is a long way from the naturalistic norm. This is an uncompromisingly stylised example of expressionism, in which we see reality through the prism of a leading character's consciousness.
I love films that put us inside the heads of unusual characters, which is why I like movies as apparently different as David Fincher's Fight Club, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Hitchcock's Vertigo and Fritz Lang's M. It's a tradition as long as cinema itself, stretching back to silent classics such as The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1919).
Just as most critics on the release of Psycho lambasted Hitchcock for making a slasher film, some will condemn Scorsese for making something as artistically disreputable as a horror flick. Open-minded filmgoers will acknowledge there are good horror films and bad ones, and Shutter Island is one of the finest, with numerous nods to previous masters of the genre, and the creepiness dial turned up to 11.
It's even more stylish and scary than Scorsese's previous venture into the genre, the muchmaligned but exquisitely crafted Cape Fear. Anyway, this isn't just horror; it's also an excellent conspiracy thriller.
I've seen DiCaprio's performance severely criticised; but I think he is at his best, especially in the moving climax, and would thoroughly deserve a Best Actor nomination at next year's Oscars.
Kingsley and Ruffalo's elegantly ambiguous performances are just as immaculately judged.
I found Shutter Island both emotionally involving and an interesting film of ideas. It explores Scorsese's favourite obsessions: guilt (never forget that Scorsese once wanted to be a Catholic priest) and mankind's capacity for evil and violence.
Shutter Island is particularly pertinent, because it's about man's tendency not merely to 'spin' the truth, but to rewrite history in order to escape unacceptable realities.
Anyone who has witnessed the evasions of, say, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the Iraq Inquiry or read the self-serving memoirs of political and military leaders will know just how timely an exploration of that topic this is. Shutter Island is a wonderfully perceptive dissection of denial.
I doubt if there will be a more brilliant picture this year.