Why The Greatness Of ‘Shutter Island’ Has Nothing to Do With Its Twist

Martin Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 in New York City — a metropolis that would go on to have a profound effect on the filmmaker’s creative output. He is one of modern cinema’s defining auteurs, and in honor of the director’s 73rd birthday, we’ve declared it Scorsese Week here at Decider. Click here to follow our coverage.

In our social-media age, the issue of how to deal with spoilers is a constant question faced by critics and journalists: How do you talk about what’s sometimes most interesting in a movie if that thing is also what viewers shouldn’t discover until they see the movie? At the same time, ever since the success of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense — and his less-successful attempts to replicate that thriller’s surprise twist in subsequent movies — there’s been an increasing desire by viewers to see if they can guess a film’s big surprise. It creates a strange phenomenon: We don’t like to have movies ruined for us, unless we’re the ones doing it for ourselves, which then makes us feel smarter than the filmmaker if we guess right.

This phenomenon partly explains why Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island has rarely gotten a fair assessment. A 2010 thriller about a U.S marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) in 1954 investigating the disappearance of a patient from an institute for the criminally insane, the movie was largely judged on the effectiveness of a third-act twist. And those judgments were often unflattering. Critics such as The New York Times’ A.O. Scott found the twist lacking, writing, “You begin to suspect almost immediately that a lot of narrative misdirection is at work here, as MacGuffins and red herrings spawn and swarm… Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.” Friends who disliked Shutter Island seemed to coalesce around a similar unhappiness, dismissing the movie by saying “I could totally see the twist coming.” In essence, they were assuming a failure on Scorsese’s part as a storyteller: If he was trying to surprise us, well, he sure did a bad job of it.

I think this is an incorrect reading of what Shutter Island is trying to do, a problem exacerbated by the fact that we have come to assume that filmmakers want to fool us with their twists. There seems to be an impression that such movies are trying to prove how clever they are, taunting us to see if we can figure their surprises out. That’s actually the opposite of what Scorsese attempts in this heartbreaking, utterly absorbing psychological drama. He’s not trying to trick us — he’s desperately trying to help his main character regain his sanity.

In case you haven’t seen Shutter Island, let’s reveal our Spoiler Alert now: Teddy Daniels, the marshal played by DiCaprio, has actually been a resident of this institute, known as Shutter Island, for the last two years, the grief he felt over his schizophrenic wife (Michelle Williams) drowning their three young children — and him then killing her in anguish — driving him to create the false “Teddy Daniels” personality. This personality split is finally explained to Teddy at the film’s end, by which point most viewers have deduced that something was amiss and that Teddy might be hiding something, even if he isn’t aware that he is.

The disappointment that some felt about Shutter Island derived from their perception that Scorsese clumsily hid his tracks, creating a film of such feverish paranoia — Is the institute doing government experiments on the patients? Who is the 67th patient if the island only houses 66 inmates? — that it was too easy for audiences to start suspecting a twist. But once you know the twist — and once you revisit the film over multiple viewings — what becomes clear is that we’re watching not to unlock the mystery but, rather, to see how Teddy interacts with it.

In what is, admittedly, a pretty farfetched form of extreme therapy, the institute’s kindhearted head psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley) has devised what we see in Shutter Island as an elaborate version of play-acting, allowing Teddy to reclaim his former mantle as a U.S. marshal to run wild on the island trying to solve the disappearance of a missing female patient, a fiction Teddy created so as not to come to terms with his own sorrow. (In Teddy’s mind, this nonexistent patient, who supposedly murdered her kids, is a stand-in for his own wife, while another patient, an arsonist whom Teddy accuses of killing his wife, represents Teddy himself, who can’t accept that he took his wife’s life during a moment of extreme distress.)

On the face of it, that explanation of what’s going on in Shutter Island is ridiculous, which is why Scorsese places the movie in a heightened reality in which there are often powerful thunderstorms, vivid flashbacks, lurid dream sequences and jarring, mismatched cuts within scenes. Just about every four months, someone on the Internet will advance a sorta-interesting/mostly-dubious alternative theory suggesting that a particular movie makes more sense if you imagine the plot as being a dream or existing within the main character’s mind, but with Shutter Island that’s actually what’s happening: Teddy’s investigation is really a figment of his warped mental state, and the intensified color, sound and anxiety swirling around him is a product of his psychosis.

Once you know all that, Shutter Island becomes one of those rare films that gains in power, depth and compassion upon rewatch. With no “surprise” to distract you, it becomes easier to focus on the machinations Teddy goes through to solve the case — a case, it’s important to remember, doesn’t exist — and the lengths the institute’s staff will go to hopefully bring Teddy back to reality. (They’re playing this game under the belief that if Teddy actually “solves” the mystery, it will lead him to realizing the truth of what happened to him.) Seen a second time, the movie is no longer a mystery but, rather, a portrait of denial, a study of the furious avoidance some people go through to avoid facing the painful truth about themselves.

DiCaprio’s performance is key to this. Working a Baaaa-ston accent and flashing twitching eyes, he tips his hand early to the fact that Teddy may be a bit off-balance. (If it’s not the initial seasickness getting to the island that discombobulates him, it’s his concern that Max von Sydow’s smug psychiatrist may be an escaped Nazi.) But as he did in another movie released in 2010, Inception, DiCaprio proves himself incredibly deft at playing a man stung by the loss of his family who ultimately chooses willful denial to painful acceptance.

That’s why Shutter Island is such a crushing tragedy. Teddy’s endless investigation — his fervent belief that he will uncover the conspiracy going on at the institute — is like watching a man slowly sinking in quicksand, all his efforts a manic, desperate countermeasure to the ugly actual truth he refuses to uncover. The movie itself serves as a warning about the distractions we all create to avoid taking a hard look at ourselves, but Scorsese has constructed it so hypnotically that I get sucked into the film’s spell each time, perhaps never fully absorbing the film’s grim lesson.

I fear I rewatch Shutter Island because part of me hopes that maybe Teddy will do something different this time. (The movie is so propulsive and alive that it feels like it’s a living thing that’s still evolving.) But instead, I note how all these different people, especially Mark Ruffalo’s doctor character, are trying to guide Teddy back to reality before it’s too late. Advertised as a horror-thriller, Shutter Island is actually incredibly moving, both because of the decision Teddy ultimately chooses and because of the many men and women who are fighting to keep him from making it. That’s why complaining about Shutter Island’s twist misses the point. The “surprise” isn’t meant for us: It’s intended for a character who desperately needs a reality check. Ironically, in an era of spoilers, Shutter Island is a film focused on a character who prefers not knowing.

Tim Grierson (@timgrierson) is senior U.S. critic for Screen International and one-half of Grierson & Leitch over at Deadspin. His most recent book, Martin Scorsese in Ten Scenes, is now available.