Peter Travers, Rolling Stone:
DiCaprio, in his most haunting and emotionally complex performance yet, is the vessel Scorsese uses to lead us through the film‚Äôs laby¬≠rinth. Adapted from Dennis Lehane‚Äôs novel by Laeta Kalogridis (Pathfinder), the twisty ‚Äî maybe too twisty ‚Äî script lets us know Teddy is a hard-drinking World War II vet with a quick fist. And flashbacks to his strained marriage to Dolores (Michelle Williams) show equal trauma at home. But mostly we see Teddy during his four days on Shutter Island. Seasick on the ferry in, Teddy tries to get to know his new partner (Ruffalo is reliably superb). The byplay between these two gifted actors rewards careful attention…
With the help of cinematographer Robert Richardson, production designer Dante Ferretti, music supervisor Robbie Robertson and editing whiz Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese holds us in a vise-like grip. The climactic scene won’t be the only thing that leaves you shattered. Scorsese makes dark magic in this mesmerizing mind-bender. No one who lives and breathes movies would dream of missing it.
Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice:
Production design maestro Dante Ferretti’s island is a rugged symbolist mythscape, pocketed with hidden places: soothsayers’ sea caves, Ward C, a squat Civil War‚Äìera fort where the most violent offenders are kept in a Goya madhouse, and, beyond it, the ultimate locked door‚Äîto the lighthouse! Scorsese’s return to his Roger Corman AIP roots is an object lesson in the proximity of high and low culture ‚Äî Shutter Island is lousy with modernist references, soundtracked by avant-garde 20th-century composers, pretentious in the best Pulp-y tradition.
138 minutes is dangerously epic for a talky thriller, but you forget the time and even whether the plot makes sense‚Äîand if you don’t notice, it doesn’t matter. Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they’ll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly…
Scorsese is as famous a movie lover as a moviemaker. This is manifest in his too-much-discussed homages, but also in his understanding of how his characters have themselves been shaped by entertainment, how they model themselves as actors in the American drama… (The announced Scorsese project, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, dealing with our nation’s premier self-publicist ham, has enormous potential.) Without revealing too much of an ending that everyone will soon insist on telling you their opinion of, Shutter Island, deep in its camp gothic trappings, seems to me a flea-pit occult history, with Daniels’s headspace a confusion of “Hideous Secrets of the Nazi Horror Cult” schlock, hard-ass Mickey Spillane machismo, Cold War psychic confusion, and the post-traumatic bad dreams of ex-servicemen…
In his documentary Personal Journey, Scorsese spoke of the ’50s as a time “when the subtext became as important as the apparent subject matter, or even more important”‚Äîand in Shutter Island, his most distinctly ’50s movie, he replays the trash culture of the era as the manifestation of an anguished subconscious.
