10 Best Films With Unreliable Narrators

Shutter Island is told from the point of view of U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels, who is sent to Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island with new partner Chuck to investigate the disappearance of a patient called Rachel. He confides in Chuck that he believes the facility is conducting illegal experiments on the patients, so this gave him an opportunity to examine this too.

Teddy starts to have nightmares and hallucinations of his time working as a soldier on a concentration camp and of an arsonist called Andrew Laeddis, who killed Teddy’s wife. He also starts to witness unusual occurrences and people acting strangely around him, furthering his conspiracy theory that there is something nefarious going on at the facility.

When we are finally presented with the truth, that Teddy is Andrew Laeddis, a violent patient who killed his wife after she drowned their three children, we start to understand and empathise with his mental state. He has repressed the memory of this as well as the trauma of the concentration camp, and the doctors were trying to let him play out his fantasy to try and bring him back to reality.

He ends up choosing to let the doctors lobotomize him, as it would be too painful to live as a ‘monster’, choosing instead to ‘die as a good man’ by essentially killing off his personality and memories as Andrew.