Saturday 27th March 2010

Shutter Island

Director: Martin Scorsese
Year: 2010
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley

What do you do at 5.30pm on a Saturday evening when you're in Weymouth, everything is shut and you're not hungry yet? If you're me, go to the cinema! I'd wanted to see Shutter Island since it had been released, but it had never been at the top of the list of films I wanted to see. However, this cinema was showing things I'd already seen, things I really didn't want to see, or Shutter Island - so that made my decision pretty easy.

At first I was concerned that the film was going to be a typical "jump at the scary parts" horror, as this is how it has been marketed. Not that I have anything against that sort of movie, I just wasn't really in the mood for it. Thankfully, it turned out that Shutter Island is more of a chiller - a "what's going on?" rather than a scare movie.

DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a cop who has gone to Shutter Island (which is a mental asylum for the criminally insane) to investigate the impossible disappearance of one of the residents there. Of course, there's much more to the story than this - half of which I had managed to work out a third of the way through the film.

Although aspects of the plot did seem pretty obvious, I still enjoyed watching things unfold - especially as there were elements of the plot I did need explained to me. Not the best thriller I've ever watched, but good enough to keep me engaged and asking questions until the end. And not a bad way to spend a couple of hours in Weymouth.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5