‘Shutter Island,’ Martin Scorsese’s eeriest film, turns 15

The Boston-set horror mind-bender combined an A-list cast with a bizarre, twisty plot.

(This essay contains spoilers, throughout, for this 15-year-old film.)

In Alan Parker’s 1987 film Angel Heart, Robert De Niro played a character (“Lou Cypher”) who turned out to be Satan, and De Niro played the part as an extended impression of his friend and frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese.

Then, 23 years later, Scorsese made a movie that not only had a similar conceit to Angel Heart but ended up with almost the same ending.

Based on Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, Shutter Island arrived in theaters in February of 2010, 15 years ago this month. It was Scorsese’s first movie after he ended his long Oscar drought with 2006’s The Departed, and while it wasn’t an Oscar juggernaut, it was a mostly well-received film. For a filmmaker whose best movies haven’t always been financially successful, Shutter Island was the fourth-biggest box office hit of his career up to this point.

In Scorsese’s filmography, it’s something of an oddity, a twisty psychological horror movie with a jarring plot twist seemingly every ten minutes, and an ending that is, to be honest, somewhat ridiculous.

I could easily have imagined Shutter Island adapted by a lesser filmmaker, with a lesser cast, and emerging as a forgettable minor movie. But because Scorsese directed it, and filled the cast with great actors up and down, the movie punched above its weight.

Shutter Island’s plot, at least as it's established at the beginning, has a pair of U.S. marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) visiting an insane asylum on an island in the Boston Harbor, in 1954. It’s a facility that houses murderers, including quite a few child killers and the ostensible reason for their visit is to look for a missing patient, Rachel Solando.