Saw Shutter Island, a fascinating, knotty puzzle of a film following Leonardo DiCaprio as a US Marshal investigating a disappearance on an island-institute for the criminally insane. He suffers from migraines and bad dreams however, and keeps flashing back to his time in the military, when he liberated Dachau, and remembering his wife in a burning apartment. Something, clearly, is up.
The film gets more and more complex as time goes by and the mystery of the escaped prisoner and Leo's dark past intertwine. The film shows dreams and contains weird, jarring, intentional continuity errors, such as when a woman is given a glass of water but clearly only mimes drinking it. This is a slippery film which, although I feel it comes to a definite conclusion at the end, is slippery enough that I'd bet folks argue, Inception-style, about what the end of the film really means. Delicious!
I really enjoyed this film. In addition to the complex mind-games, we get to see lots of strange imagery: rats inexplicably swarming the beaches, dead bodies flowing out of train cars, frozen in ice, Ben Kingsley calling Leo "baby." I also really liked the island locale. It's small and claustrophobic enough that, as one character puts it, "they'll always find us" but large enough that someone can believably go missing for a few days. It's like a really high-budget version of The Prisoner.
The acting was solid, but I was mostly there for the plot. The locale was a nice surprise and everything is shot just gorgeously. It's got some nice histrionics, but it's a puzzle-film first, like Inception. If you're not in the mood to pay close attention give it a pass, but if you like mysteries and can stand some ambiguity, give it a shot.
No comments:
Post a Comment