Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese's new movie is a tale of sound and fury, signifying … well, not nothing exactly, but a heck of a lot less than it promises, given the straining intensity of those performances, the glowering darkness of mood, the grand gesture at 20th-century history's grimmest nightmares, and the sheer length. This was supposed to be Scorsese's experiment in B-movie thrills, but no mere B-movie director would go on for two hours and 20 minutes. That's an auteur running time we're talking about, and at the end of it, I got a whiff of shaggy dog.

The silly twist ending is supremely exasperating, and creating the narrative foundation for this final revelatory whiplash has meant laying down some long scenes that at the time look baffling and unconvincing. However, I admit everything looks good and fits together, and the film packs a fair-sized punch. Shutter Island is based on the 2003 thriller from Dennis Lehane, the author of Mystic River (filmed by Clint Eastwood) and Gone Baby Gone (filmed by Ben Affleck). The setting is the 1950s, an era when America's fighting men from the second world war would often have found uniformed jobs such as police officers in civilian life. One such is US Marshal Teddy Daniels, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the scowling mode that he presented to the camera in Scorsese's The Departed, a man in almost constant spiritual pain.

As a cop, he is someone who has seen his share of horror in the line of duty, and is now about to see an awful lot more. But this isn't at all why he appears so profoundly troubled. The clue here lies in Daniels's troubled personal life: his war record, and the death of his wife.

We see him first on a ferry, wretched with a seasickness that is a part of his continuing personal malaise. He and his partner are travelling over the water to a scarily forbidding prison called Shutter Island, a former civil-war fortress that has been converted into a maximum security facility for the criminally insane, and Teddy has reason to suspect that his wife's murderer is being kept here. Mark Ruffalo plays his partner Chuck – tough, level-headed, and much less affected by what he sees.

On the island itself, both officers are disconcerted by sudden bad weather preventing them from leaving, and the fact that the prison chief, smoothly amiable and pipe-smoking Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley), seems to have been granted authority to do more or less as he wishes on his remote island kingdom. To the cops' disgust, Dr Cawley explains his liberal therapies for the psychotic murderers in his care. He disapproves of brutal lobotomies and electric shocks, preferring a radical new approach of letting the patients cathartically work through and act out their anxieties.

Teddy and Chuck are there to investigate the disappearance of a female prisoner patient from her cell: a stark impossibility, given the security conditions – unless the guards have helped her in return for sexual favours, or the prison authorities themselves, for their own sinister reasons, have made away with her.

The fact that Dr Cawley's associate Dr Nähring, played by Max von Sydow, is German, triggers traumatic memories. Teddy was one of the US soldiers who liberated Dachau; to him, Shutter Island has distinct similarities, and little by little, he suspects that the government has secretly enlisted certain qualified foreigners to help with psychological research here, using patients as guinea pigs. More even than this, secluded Shutter Island may simply have evolved into the doctors' private sociopathic fiefdom, a mad, dysfunctional sect where they do as they like – and have no intention of letting suspicious police officers ever leave.

Kingsley, DiCaprio, Von Sydow and Ruffalo give the picture solidity and weight, and Scorsese provides Hitchcockian and Kubrickian perspectives on that weird, secluded place which is closed in and yet agoraphobically exposed. It is perfectly possible to enjoy Shutter Island as a pulpy melodrama, yet I couldn't help thinking that an actual pulpy melodrama would be leaner in terms of plot; it would move more swiftly and be less self-conscious. There's just so much classy, brassy furniture in this movie, in every respect: acting, direction, music and production design. It is distractingly, disproportionately engorged with technique – all leading to a contrived ending. As for DiCaprio as Teddy, it is an angry, unsmiling and rather opaque performance: the type of performance that Scorsese is now habitually getting from him, in movies including The Departed, The Aviator and Gangs of New York: but he undoubtedly has presence and star-wattage, and carries the film.

The awful secret of Shutter Island, which Teddy has in fact not yet begun to grasp, is finally hammered home by Scorsese with muscular determination – a cinematic sledgehammer for a pretty small nut.