6. Shutter Island (2010)
In 1954, two US Marshalls - Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule travel to Shutter Island where there is a hospital for the criminally insane. They are looking for a patient called Rachel Solando who has been locked up for killing her three children. The authorities and doctors are uncooperative. Daniels gets disturbing flashbacks to the liberation of Dachau and also of his wife who was killed in a fire by arsonist Andrew Laeddis. His wife, in a dream tells him Laeddis is still on the island and this is a major incentive for him to stay there - to hunt him down. With no cooperation forthcoming, Daniels and Aule break into Ward C where a patient tells them that patients get lobotomised in the light house. Daniels and Aule get separated on the rocks on their way to the light house. Daniels comes across a woman in a cave who claims to be the real Rachel Solando. She tells Daniels she was a former psychiatrist who left the hospital after the doctors were experimenting on patients with psychotropic drugs and mind control techniques. Meanwhile Aule has disappeared, and Daniels confronts Dr Cawley, the lead psychiatrist, who tells him there never was an Aule and Daniels himself is Andrew Laeddis who killed his wife after she killed their children. All of what he has just experienced is to let his psyche unravel its conspiracy theory obsession. Everything was played out for him. The memory of killing his wife comes back to him and he faints. When he wakes up he can tell the doctors about the killing and they take this as progress. Apparently he was as forward as this nine months prior but regressed. The doctors tell him this is his last chance. Unfortunately he has a psychotic relapse and the doctors take him away, presumably to be lobotomised. It is established that Martin Scorsese is a cinematic genius. Shutter Island is another great piece of work - it is, for me anyway, a psychological horror film where schizophrenia is the bogey man. The film shows very accurately how asylums would have been run back then. To let Laeddis play out his psychotic fantasies is a bit extreme, but there is little doubt that there was little effective medication for the mentally ill back then and in places such as a hospital for the criminally insane, I'm sure they handed out lobotomies like sweeties. An interesting film which shows the impossibility of getting over guilt and the psychological effect that has on the schizophrenic.