For such a long career, Martin Scorsese has an incredibly high batting average when it comes to the quality of his films. Across 26 narrative features and 16 documentaries, the maestro’s work is rarely met with anything less than effusive praise from critics and audiences alike. Looking at his career through the imperfect lens of Rotten Tomatoes scores, his films rarely have anything below a consensus of 75%, and even movies which were divisive at the time, like 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, have been looked upon more favorably in the years since their release.
But still, even the greatest artists are bound to hit snags from time to time, and one of Scorsese’s most divisive films recently celebrated its 15th anniversary: 2010’s Shutter Island, a psychological thriller starring one of the director’s most treasured collaborators, Leonardo DiCaprio. With a Tomatometer score of 69%, it’s the third-lowest-scoring film he’s directed, ahead of his debut Boxcar Bertha (54%) and New York, New York (57%). While Rotten Tomatoes isn’t necessarily the best indicator of a film’s quality, it does paint the picture that Shutter Island split the opinions of critics when it premiered. But does it deserve such a polarizing reception?
‘Shutter Island’ Is an Outlier in Scorsese’s Filmography
For those who’ve never seen it (or haven’t seen it in a while), Shutter Island is adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane, and tells the story of U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), who travel to the titular island to visit the psychiatric facility housed there to look into the disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solando, who drowned her three children. Teddy quickly suspects that the hospital staff, particularly head psychiatrist Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), is hiding something, and gets drawn deeper into a conspiracy that threatens to put his very sanity to the test.
Shutter Island lives in a relatively overlooked corner of Scorsese’s filmography, one where he experiments with genres and styles that feel like outliers from the tales of misfits and gangsters that inhabit his most well-known classics. It sits alongside works like 2011’s family-oriented historical fantasy Hugo or 1997’s Kundun, his epic about the life of the Dalai Lama, which feel so different from much of his other works that they almost seem like they were made by a different director. Shutter Island is probably the closest he’s ever come to making a horror movie, crafting a heavily atmospheric and unsettling thriller with a distinctly classic feel.
Many critics noted the influence of Alfred Hitchcock, but the film also draws from 1940s film noir and atmospheric horror movies like 1942’s Cat People and 1960s Hammer horror films. While Scorsese has always played around with style and narrative form in his films, Shutter Island is overtly stylized in a way that stands out from his other works. The film’s use of light and shadow is particularly effective, as in the scene where Teddy is hit with a migraine during a heavy storm, lightning flashes, temporarily turning the whole screen bright white. Teddy’s journey into the restricted parts of the hospital is as unsettling as anything Scorsese has done, a dark and dreary netherworld that feels like descending into Hell.
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Why ‘Shutter Island’ Was So Divisive
So if Shutter Island has so much going for it, why did it get such an uncharacteristically cool reception when it came out? One big reason might stem from its big narrative twist, which many critics and fans considered pretty predictable. It’s true that there are plenty of hints along the way as to the direction the story is heading, and this may have contributed to the sense that the film wasn’t quite as effective on a storytelling level as it needed to be. The heavily stylized feel didn’t help in this regard, as some critics pointed to the disconnect between its engrossing sense of style and its somewhat unsatisfying story.
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Even those that do like the film consider it to be a fairly minor entry in the director’s filmography, one where he’s mostly playing around in a cinematic sandbox and creating something deliberately unserious, an exercise in style more than anything else. Still, that style is a wonder to behold, and a big part of what makes Shutter Island feel special among Scorsese’s works. The double-edged sword of being an artist of Scorsese’s caliber is that even perfectly enjoyable, if somewhat minor, works like Shutter Island feel that much more disappointing when placed up against the heights their work is capable of. But divorced from these expectations, the film is still leagues better than what many other directors might attempt.
Scorsese will likely forever be known for gritty, street-level works like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver, and it’s hard to argue against those being his greatest contributions to film history. But works like Shutter Island also reveal a different side of the director, one that proves defining a “Martin Scorsese film” isn’t so easy. Scorsese has shown no signs of slowing down any time soon, and the world of film is better for it, no matter what kind of movie he chooses to make.
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