Shutter Island is a psychological thriller, starring Leonardo De Caprio as Teddy Daniels, that attacks our fears on an entire new level.
The overall dark tone and bleak state of mind we are in builds and builds, never letting go through out the movies entirety.
The film is thrilling, captivating, and most importantly, extremely entertaining.
Some have complained that they are dissatisfied with the ending and saw it coming from miles away.
Yes, you may think you know where it is going, that you anticipated the right turn when in arrived, but no one will be expecting the sudden left turn it makes in the films conclusion.
While Shutter Island was made by a true master of the film trade, one thing you will find unpleasantly delightful, is the director’s ability to genuinely creep you out in several terrifying scenes.
The film doesn’t rely on loud bags in the silence (although a few do occur, and will make you jump) but more on dark imagery and even darker dialogue that never lets up and brings the tension to a painfully disturbing level.
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This one will not escape your thoughts so easily.
It’s 1954, and up-and-coming U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Boston’s Shutter Island Ashecliffe Hospital.
He’s been pushing for an assignment on the island for personal reasons, but before long he wonders whether he hasn’t been brought there as part of a twisted plot by hospital doctors whose radical treatments range from unethical to illegal to downright sinister.
Teddy’s shrewd investigating skills soon provide a promising lead, but the hospital refuses him access to records he suspects would break the case wide open.
As a hurricane cuts off communication with the mainland, more dangerous criminals “escape” in the confusion, and the puzzling, improbable clues multiply, Teddy begins to doubt everything …
grab your cushions! 
magic
Click below for the goofs
Goofs
- Continuity: When Teddy interviews the first patient, he scrawls in his notebook to the point of tearing the paper in one shot. The paper is intact in a later shot.
- Continuity: When Teddy confronts Dr. Naehring in the hallway, Teddy holds the syringe very close to Dr. Naehring’s neck, then so far away it’s out of the shot, then close again for several shots.
- Continuity: When Teddy is sitting in bed in the lighthouse, he holds his head with his left hand. In the next shot, his hands are folded in his lap.
- Continuity: When Teddy and Chuck are standing on the cliffs, the weather is gray and overcast. When Teddy runs through the woods alone to get closer to the lighthouse, the weather is very sunny.
- Continuity: When Teddy talks to George Noyce, George’s right hand grips the bars when the camera focuses on Teddy. When the camera focuses on George, his right hand is continuously scratching the top of his head.
- Revealing mistakes: After Teddy knocks out the guard at the lighthouse, he climbs the rocks to the door. On the rocks is a plastic drink cup lid from a Styrofoam cup. Plastic drink cup lids were not around in the 1950s.
- Anachronisms: A recording of Mahler’s piano quartet plays in Dr. Cawley’s study and in the Nazi officer’s office at Dachau. The first recording of the quartet was released in 1973.
- Continuity: When Teddy interrogates Bridget Kearns, she takes his notebook, spins it, and writes something part of the way down, on the page to the left. Later, when he shows Chuck Aule what she wrote, her writing is on the bottom of the page to the right.
- Continuity: At the beginning of the interview with Mrs. Kerns, as the shot moves back and forth between Kerns and Teddy, the smoke from her cigarette moves in two different directions.
- Continuity: When Teddy and Chuck are on the cliff, Chuck reaches in his shirt pocket. From the opposite view, Chuck’s hands at his side, and reaches into his shirt pocket again.
- Revealing mistakes: The fractured brick wall that Teddy climbs over moves a bit when he leaps up on it.
- Revealing mistakes: At the lighthouse, two shots of the paper Teddy is given to read show a blank page.
- Continuity: When Teddy is interviewing the nurses and doctors, the clock in the background says 7:20 and never changes, while scene lasts far longer than a minute.
- Continuity: In Cawley’s study, Daniels puts down his soda and ice on the table and emphatically shoves his hands in his pockets. In the few moments that the view changes to Cawley and Naehring and back again, and the glass is back in his hand.
- Incorrectly regarded as goofs: By all accounts, the pre-dawn liberation of Dachau took place during a late spring snowstorm, and additional troops arriving in the morning also reported a fresh blanket of snow, so the depiction of snow at Dachau is not a goof.
- Continuity: When Teddy is talking to Dr. Naehring and Dr. Cawley in the office, Teddy’s belt is sticking out in front of his jacket in one shot and behind his jacket in another, this happens several times.
- Anachronisms: After the storm blows out the electricity, Daniels comments about the “electronics” being knocked out. The word “electronics” was not in the vernacular of non-scientists in the 50s. Even so, there were likely no “electronics” as part of the electrical systems utilized for containing the patients – simply electrical switches, solenoids, etc.
- Continuity: In the scene when Teddy and Chuck are in the cemetery and the storm picks up, there is a small leaf stuck to Chuck’s face. In the shot immediately after, the leaf is gone.
- Crew or equipment visible: When Teddy and Chuck climb up the hill to find out whats happening in the light house, one can see camera’s shadow on the ground moving as they climb up.
- Continuity: When Teddy and Chuck are first in Dr. Cawley’s office and Teddy has a migraine, he is given a glass of water and aspirin by Dr. Cawley. With the glass in hand, Teddy drinks the water and downs the pill. In the shot immediately after, the glass has been moved from his hand to the table.
- Factual errors: A recording of Mahler’s piano quartet plays in the SS officer’s office at Dachau. Since Gustav Mahler was a Jewish composer, his music was banned during the Nazi era and no records with Mahler’s works were available in Germany. A hard-line SS officer would not have dared to own or listen to blacklisted Jewish music.
- Crew or equipment visible: When Teddy first sees his daughter lying face down in the lake, as he wades through the water to get her, a hand can be seen holding the leg of the girl, and disappears as Teddy arrives
- Continuity: In the beginning of the movie Teddy and Chuck stand on deck of the ferry. Chuck puts a cigarette in his mouth. In the next shot Chuck again puts a cigarette in his mouth.
- Continuity: When Teddy talks to George Noyce in his cell, Noyce’s right arm changes from being on his head to being on the bars between shots.
- Continuity: After the interrogated woman drinks her glass of water, she places the empty glass on the table. When she stands up and leaves, you can clearly see that the glass is half full.
- Continuity: When Mrs. Kearns writes her note in Teddy’s notebook, she does so by grabbing his ball- point pen. When Teddy later reveals what she wrote outside during the rainstorm, the ink runs off the paper as if it was written with a fountain pen but the same ball-point pen is tucked in the notebook so it was obviously used instead of a fountain pen.
- Factual errors: There is a flashback in which Teddy sees the entry gate of Dachau, with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei”. However, the gate style is copied from the gate of Auschwitz, liberated by the Soviet troops. “Arbeit Macht Frei” text that Dachau has is totally different in the reality, and not equally symbolic as the one from Auschwitz gate.
- Continuity: Teddy is soaked after he pulls the children out of the water, but the children are completely dry.
- Continuity: When Teddy’s kids are lying next to each other, his daughter’s arms go from uncrossed to crossed.
- Revealing mistakes: When Teddy brings his murdered children out of the water, one of the boys is clearly holding on to him as they make their way to shore.
- Revealing mistakes: When Teddy takes the shoe off of his murdered daughter and arranges her hands, she moves several times.
- Continuity: When Teddy is scaling the cliff, the document proving the existence of the 67th patient lands to his right. As he tries to grab it, he slips and falls a few feet. He reaches again for the document and grabs it, even though it should be a few feet up, and to his right.
- Continuity: When the sons are first placed on the shore, their feet are nearly touching. A few moments later, they are several feet apart.
- Anachronisms: Teddy attempts to revive the children with CPR, which was invented in 1956, 2 years after the movie is set and 4 years after the children drown.
- Revealing mistakes: Near the end of the movie, as Andrew mourns his three drowned children next to the lake, the children briefly move and breathe.
- Revealing mistakes: When the children are in the water, the little girl’s wet suit is visible a few times.
- Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When Teddy interrogates Bridget Kearns, Chuck brings her a glass of water, but when she is filmed drinking she has no glass in her hand. In the next scene she puts the empty glass on the table. However, this is more likely to be intentional revealing of the “role play” performed for Teddy, than a mistake on the part of the actress, imitating drinking when there was a perfectly good glass on the table.