We were excited. We had been for weeks. We went at about one in the afternoon, to the box office, to get our tickets—well ahead of the 6:45 showing, and a good thing, too. The show was sold out by the time we came back at 6. The film was Shutter Island, the new thriller by film-maker Martin Scorsese and it promised to be very good.

Waiting in line for snacks, I missed the theatre darkening for the previews, I missed the chaos of seats filling up, but according to Maria it was madness. It was a heroic effort on her part that my seat didn’t get snatched away, so she tells me. But the energy in the air as I snuck into the theatre and found my seat next to hers was palpable. A nervous energy; everyone knowing what to expect from the movie they’d come to see, but not quite sure at the same time.

Shutter Island, if you don’t know, is about a U.S. Marshall, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, sent to solve the case of a woman missing from a prison for the criminally insane. It’s the 1950s, on an island, in Boston Harbour during a hurricane.

Shutter Island is everything that I thought it would be: a thriller, in capable hands.

For me, the test of a good thriller, a movie where you’re putting together the pieces of the puzzle as you go, is how long you talk about it after it’s over. Shutter Island is the kind of movie you can talk about for hours. The sheer weight of the mystery, the twists and the turns, is incredible. And the brilliance of this film, I think, is that you aren’t necessarily scared of things on the screen, but scared that you’ll lose your mind trying to keep up. How fitting is that?

Indeed, Scorsese has brought to mystery to life in this psychological thriller. Everything about it is great. The visuals—the bleak and decaying island prison, the civil war-era buildings, the storm-raved landscape—these alone are worth the price of admission. Not to mention the musical score. Scorsese creates a whole world in which his characters live and interact, a world, on this strange forsaken island, in which madness touches everything. To say that there aren’t scary scenes wouldn’t be true but it isn’t that kind of scary movie. Instead, Shutter Island wraps you up in its protagonist’s plight, transports you there alongside him and it’s that, it’s being there, that will scare the heck out of you.

I can say without a doubt that Shutter Island is the new standard by which all thrillers will be judged, and will pale in comparison.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.