A thriller on an island, chosen as a film about the mind

The writer chose Shutter Island, released in 2010, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, because it seemed a fit for a review about modern mental health. The year of release stays in 2010. DiCaprio plays Teddy, who comes to an isolated island with a partner to find a patient who has escaped from the hospital there.

The film is set in a hospital, and both Teddy and his wife, the notes say, have suffered severe mental illness — schizophrenia, delusion, depression. What the film shows, the writer thinks, is what a person can look like in the grip of such illness.

The hospital of the 1950s, as the film draws it, is a place for care and protection, and also a place that holds people who have committed violent crimes. The escaped patient had been in Ward C, among serious offenders. That 1950s setting stays in the film.

A storm, a missing partner, and a lighthouse

The island lies tens of kilometres from the mainland, and a hard storm is blowing, so an escape seems, in ordinary sense, almost impossible. There is no trace of the missing person. Teddy’s partner then disappears as well.

While looking for him, Teddy meets, in a cave on a cliff, a woman who has come out of the hospital. She had been a doctor there, the notes say, and had been punished for opposing an unethical method: a lobotomy, a pick driven into a patient’s brain. She had fled, she tells him, to make the truth known. Those operations, she says, are done in a lighthouse on the island, and the missing partner may already be under that knife.

After arriving, Teddy himself begins to hear voices, to see things that are not there, and to grow more violent. Then he comes to see that all of it had happened inside his own mind. The events had been a psychodrama, arranged for his later treatment.

A war, a family, and a story he had to invent

What Teddy had actually lived, as the notes set it out, began in the Second World War. He took part in the liberation of a Nazi camp, and he killed German soldiers who had already laid down their arms. He later felt this was not a killing forced by battle, but a slaughter, and the guilt stayed with him.

After the war he became a sheriff, but the trauma led to alcoholism. His wife fell into a depression and, trying to take her own life, set fire to the house. They moved to a country house by a lake, to be safer from fire. Her illness did not ease. She drowned their children in the lake. Coming home to that scene, in rage and grief and shame at not having cared for her, he shot her.

That shooting, the writer says, was real. To admit it would have brought the guilt of not having helped her depression, the fear that his drinking had caused it, and the memory of the German soldiers — a weight he did not think his mind could bear. So he made up people and situations as a defense, fell ill, and was brought to the hospital as the lead in a psychodrama. What first looked like a thriller about a detective solving a case was, the writer concludes, a picture of how a war can wreck a person, and how that wreckage can reach a wife and children. The visit to the island as a detective was itself the fiction.

The same Korean review, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student review of the 2010 film Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy and Mark Ruffalo.
2. The 1950s hospital setting, Ward C, a lobotomy in a lighthouse, and a psychodrama, as the notes describe them.
3. A wartime past, a wife’s depression, and a shooting, left as the review tells them, without names the notes do not give.

Last updated: 14 November 2026