Shutter Island

I first discovered American author Dennis Lehane via the Clint Eastwood directed film Mystic River (2003) a brooding thriller about a 19 year-old girls cold blooded murder which starred Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon. Then there was the three Lehane scripted episodes of the HBO series The Wire. Gone Baby Gone (2007) the second of his novels to be adapted into a film was based on one of the Kenzie-Gennaro novels. Directed by Ben Affleck and starring brother Casey as Patrick Kenzie and Michelle Monaghan as Angela Kenzie as two private detectives who investigate the mysterious disappearance of a small child. The latest novel from the award winning author to be adapted is the 2010 psychological mystery thriller Shutter Island directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo and Michelle Williams. The story centres on a troubled US Marshall Teddy Daniels ( DiCaprio) who travels to a remote island along with his partner Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) to search for a criminally insane patient, Rachel Saldans (Emily Mortimer), who has escaped from a locked cell inside the Ashecliffe High Security Federal Asylum. It latter evolves that Daniels is really on a private revenge mission against a man he believes to be a patient in the asylum called Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas) who two years before deliberately started a fire that killed his wife Dolores (Williams). I found this film quite unnerving and certainly not a comfortable watch, nothing in this film is what it appears to be as we are guided skilfully through the darkest recesses of a mans mind. It a claustrophobic mind-fuck, one in which your never sure of the truth. Requires more than one viewing!