Shutter Island

How this film uses it

Anything on Shutter Island could be something Teddy Daniels has made up: the other patients, the guards, the buildings, the storm. Scorsese makes the island itself feel wrong, from its scale and its light to how everyone on it behaves. The film is designed so you suspect things aren't real before Teddy does. Then it makes you doubt your own suspicion.

Where to see it

The lighthouse interior. In this moment, the made-up reality and the actual one are both in front of you. You hold both in your head as the reveal arrives.

How this film uses it

Teddy keeps having visions of his wife and daughter, and they work the way dreams do. She dissolves into ash, the geography is impossible and the children rise out of water. Scorsese shoots these sequences to look like traumatic memory, which is different from how a hallucination would look. They hang together too well to be psychotic and are too impossible to be real. So the dream logic ends up as the film's evidence for both readings at once.

Where to see it

The recurring Dolores visions. There's the ash from her dress, and trauma shown with exact physical detail. It looks like memory and works like delusion.

How this film uses it

The reveal about Teddy Daniels and Andrew Laeddis changes every scene in the film when you look back. The other characters' behavior was mysterious before, and now you can explain it as role-playing. The buildings felt threatening before, and now they are there for his treatment. You have to replay 2 hours of film with a completely different understanding of it.

Where to see it

Dr. Cawley's explanation. He lays out what you were really watching the whole time, and you rethink every earlier scene at once.

How this film uses it

Shutter Island openly borrows from 1940s film noir and horror, including Laura and Val Lewton's low-budget thrillers, and critics compare its plot to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a German Expressionist film from the 1920s full of distorted sets and heavy shadows. Its sets, lighting and framing are deliberate quotations. Scorsese uses the quoting as a genre trap, which goes further than tribute. He builds a film that feels like something you already know how to read. Then he reveals that what you knew was the problem.

Where to see it

The flashback sequences to the liberation of Dachau at the end of the war. The heightened, stylized look makes the trauma feel like it belongs to cinema's memory as well as Teddy's.