10 Most Unreliable Movie Narrators Of All Time
3. Teddy Daniels - Shutter Island
The ‘it was you all along’ or ‘you were actually a crazy person this whole time’ twist is one of the oldest, cheapest tricks in cinema’s playbook, but it actually worked like a charm in Scorsese’s 2010 thriller Shutter Island. From the film’s opening, we’re led to believe that Teddy is a hot-shot US Marshal, sent to Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane in order to solve a missing persons case.
The hospital is creepy and somewhat dilapidated, but Teddy greets it with equal parts familiarity and foreboding. That’s because Teddy is actually Andrew Laeddis, an incarcerated patient of the facility who was locked away for killing his wife, Dolores Chanal, after she drowned their three children. The facility’s lead psychiatrist explains that ‘Edward Daniels’ is an anagram of Andrew Laeddis, and Rachel Solando – the woman Daniels was supposedly there to find – is an anagram of Dolores Chanal. Insane and grief stricken after murdering his wife, Laeddis had concocted a scenario wherein he was a heroic Marshal, a story the Ashecliffe staff were willing to play along with in an attempt to break his psychosis.
All along we had trusted Daniels to get to the bottom of the Ashecliffe mystery, when Teddy himself was the mystery.