Shutter Island

Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese work well together, and Shutter Island is another of their good workmanlike movies. It's apparent that Scorsese honed many tricks of the horror genre while making Cape Fear. Audiences for such scary entertainments get what they'd expect, from insistently melodramatic soundtracks to villains with bulging eyes, from very fishy red herrings to raging sound-effected storms and expertly lit spooky cinematography.

Based on a novel be Dennis Lehane, the screenplay assembled many of the usual horror suspects. A mental hospital for convicted murderers on an isolated island in Boston Harbor, possibly funded by a secret government agency, staffed by a possible former Nazi or two, loses a female killer. It's the mid-50s, and two US marshals arrive from the mainland, seeking answers to inexplicable questions.

Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mark Ruffalo as his newly-appointed sidekick, are a pair of credibly plump, middle-ageing cops getting out of their depth, place and mind on the island. Psychiatrists with contrasting styles and mesmerising evil character defects run the prison -- Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow underplaying their juicy roles with chilling effect.

DiCaprio's cop is a WW2 veteran, haunted not only by memories of Dachau. His wife (Michelle Williams) and daughter had been killed in a fire, and he's grabbed an assignment that he hopes will let him discover the vanished arsonist.

Confusing cameo roles (as for Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson) appear and disappear, in settings that sometimes seem modeled on Hitchcock classics. Scorsese's customary nimble direction, aided greatly by his regular film editor, gives many scenes eye-catching angles, shadows, lighting and abrupt jump cuts. Much of the time, in subterranean corridors and cells, in windy woodland and atop sea-whipped cliffs, the movie feels black-and-white, its chilling bleakness highlighted brilliantly by sudden patches of richly coloured flashbacks and crowd scenes.

The twists in the tail of the movie gain grudging acceptance, leaving this viewer eager to watch the movie another time in order to better appreciate the dazzling flair of Scorsese and the cunning complexity of DiCaprio's performance.