Review of Shutter Island (2010) by Dane P — 17 Nov 2014

Leonard DiCaprio played an able peace officer who has mysterious facts in the past greatly. Personally, I like movies which he plays as a main character, because he is always emotional, powerful and nice on the movies. This movie also showed me these abilities which he has clearly.

The main scene is an island which is called 'Shutter Island'. In the island, criminals with mental illness were taken. Teddy Daniels who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio was a great peace officer. To find a woman who disappeared from a prison in the island, he went there with his partner. When he arrived at the island, he found that the criminals, polices and psychiatrists look strange. Additionally, he heard that mental experiments using the criminals has been operated in the island. Thus, Teddy decided to seek the woman and fine what is happening in the island. He visited a paramount of psychiatrists in the island. When he met him, he experienced a phenomenon. He felt sick, and he saw that his wife who is killed by an arson attack said something mysterious to him in his dream. After that, he experienced the phenomenon several times when he went to bed, met criminals to ask about the woman and so on. Actually, the dream had to do with what he did in the past. Before he became a peace police, he was a solder in The Second World War. In the war, he saw a lot of dead people, and killed a lot of people. He also got information which a criminal who killed his wife stay in a prison for dangerous criminals. He went there, and found him, but he experienced the phenomenon again. He saw his children who were killed by someone in his dream. He was getting crazy, and the phenomenon made him feel like he has to solve what is happening in the island. He heard that in a tower which is located far from prisons, illness surgeries are operated. He thought that everything he has to find and wants to know is there. He went to the tower, and he gained surprising facts there.

When I first saw this movie, it was difficult for me to understand this movie. However, I felt scary when I saw it second time because I realized meanings of this movie. There are two types of world; real world and hallucinatory world on the movie. Teddy goes and back to these world, and the facts are uncovered little by little. I think that these world represent some issues about psychiatry. In the past, psychiatrists used surgeries to take humans' emotions such as angers, griefs and anxieties, to cure mental illnesses because they thought that the illnesses are caused by the emotions. However, if the emotions are taken from humans, can people say that the humans are still alive as a human? People have emotions. Therefore, humans are same with robots if they do not have emotions. Nowadays, the surgeries are not allowed, but people should mull about the psychiatric problems.