'Shutter Island': A cinematic thrill ride to a remote hospital for the criminally insane

Combine a remote island, an institution for the criminally insane, a dark night, a devastating hurricane, a federal marshal with questionable motives and a host of faces with hauntingly precise bone structure and what do you have? Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island," a luridly effective thrill ride of a movie that leaves no old-dark-house stone unturned, including a host of rats, a series of flashbacks involving doomed children, and water, water everywhere.

Dennis Lehane's 2003 novel (he's the author of "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone," also well-translated to the screen) is the sort of book you read in crazed spurts, like you're jumping into a speeding car each time you pick it up. At its center is Teddy Edwards, a federal marshal in 1954 Boston who travels by boat with his partner Chuck to a barren, remote place called Shutter Island. They have business at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane: A murderer and madwoman, Rachel Solando, has escaped her locked cell and is out somewhere in the night — and, with little help from the hospital's strangely disinterested staff, the marshals must investigate.

Need I say that all this shadowy setup frames a story that often isn't quite what it seems, and that Teddy's own troubled past (he's haunted by visions of his young wife, who died in a fire) will become entwined with the present? And could any reader miss the fact that this is wonderfully cinematic stuff? Not the serious Oscar-winning kind, but the eat-popcorn-and-scream-at-a- Saturday-matinee kind, and Scorsese understands just what he's doing here, making a movie reminiscent of the kind of old-school noir thriller rarely seen these days.

"Shutter Island" on screen is sometimes just a shade on the right side of silly — the basso bleats of the score all but scream "DANGER!" — but it's compelling, nostalgic and sometimes weirdly beautiful. Dream images float through it, from Teddy's fevered imagination; some horrific (including a profoundly upsetting scene of child murder), some merely strange. The institution — a series of desolate-looking buildings, as if they were left to rot some time ago — becomes a character, looming like a malevolent force, and the film's vivid, flaming reds and yellows jump at you from the screen, soaking the characters like the perpetually falling rain.

Leonardo DiCaprio, as Teddy, gives a performance of touching desperation, playing a man increasingly aware that the ground is crumbling beneath him. In a stellar cast, other standouts include Ben Kingsley as the institution's creepily self-possessed chief of staff; Patricia Clarkson as the film's brief, terrifying voice of reason; and Robin Bartlett, who in a tiny role as a maybe-not-so-insane patient conveys the kind of raw nervousness that makes you believe she'll erupt before our eyes. "Shutter Island" is a high-toned thriller unafraid to go a little crazy; like the book, you can't turn away.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com