review of Shutter Island

Personally, Shutter Island is one of my favorite movies. In short, it's about a U.S. Marshal who takes on a case at a mental hospital housing the most dangerous criminals with mental illnesses. The problem is that the hospital is on a remote island, and little by little, the marshal becomes entangled in situations that make him question even his own existence.

What makes this movie so unforgettable is its ending. It has a twist that very few filmmakers manage to match. In the end, we discover that the marshal is actually one of the most dangerous patients in the hospital, and that everything he experienced was an experiment to force him to remember his past and accept the truth. His wife suffered from a mental illness, and one day, when he returned home, he found that she had drowned their children in the lake. In a desperate act, he killed her.

The most shocking aspect isn't just the tragedy itself, but how his mind creates an alternate reality to cope with the pain. In the end, when he seems to have remembered everything, if he didn't, they were going to perform a lobotomy on him. And just before that happens, the marshal says to his psychiatrist:

“What would be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”

After that, the psychiatrist looks at him sadly and gives a slight signal to the guards. That signal indicates that “recovery was not achieved,” or at least that's what it appears. But in reality, we understand that he was cured, only that he decided to pretend otherwise, to stop living with the guilt and “die as a good man.”

This part surprised me a lot. The film makes you think about how the human mind can create realities to protect itself from pain. Sometimes, even in everyday life, people deceive themselves just to feel good or to keep going in a completely crazy world.

Shutter Island is a film I recommend to everyone, even if you don't like thrillers. The story is incredible on its own, but when you add Martin Scorsese's direction and the performances of Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, the result is a masterpiece. It's one of those films that leaves you thinking long after it ends.