Shutter Island: R: disturbing violent content, language, nudity; 2:18

$ $ $ $  (out of $5)

By John M. Urbancich, Sun News February 18, 2010, 7:01PM

The clues are all there to discover in “Shutter Island,” the latest from director Martin Scorsese and a film that unfolds nothing like its well-worn trailer indicates it might.

That’s a very good thing, of course, since most promos usually offer too much pertinent info. This one meanders for a while until settling into compelling psychological thriller mode. (Think Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” mixing with something such as, say, “The Snake Pit.”)

It opens with a seasick Leo DiCaprio barfing in a bathroom on a boat cutting through pea-soup thick Boston fog. He plays U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, emerging from his own nauseous haze to meet new partner Chuck Aule (the always-strong Mark Ruffalo), who hails from Seattle . . . or maybe it’s Portland.

The year is 1954 and the two tough cookies are on their way to Alcatraz-like Ashecliffe Hospital, an island fortress housing the criminally insane. (Who knows? Perhaps that even includes the security force and the medical team working there.)

The law-abiding duo arrives, we think, to investigate the disappearance of inmate/child killer Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), but arrogant chief physicians (the terrific Ben Kingsley and the suitably creepy Max Van Sydow) aren’t very forthcoming with answers even to the most basic of questions.

Daniels, a WWII vet with memories of the horrors he’s witnessed at Dachau death camp, starts wondering what’s really going on. Meanwhile, the more you watch, the more you consider that perhaps Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (“Night Watch”) may have based their spooky setting on fact.

Worse yet, with references to Nazis, Joe McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American activities, and so-called lobotomies, did some of the experiments Daniels thinks might be in the works at Ashecliffe really take place in our country after the war? Apparently not, since the film is based on a 2003 best seller by Dennis Lehane, the same writer whose “Mystic River” became an Oscar-nominated film a few years ago.

Anyway, a hurricane opens doors to whole new realms on the island, and the astonishingly intense DiCaprio takes us through an assortment of mind games, flashbacks to his dead wife (Michelle Williams) and meetings with an assortment of memorable characters played by Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine and Elias Koteas.

By the time Scorsese and company reveal a dramatic and mostly unexpected conclusion, some might even wonder why the whole tricky shebang is not called “Shudder Island.”

Read more by John M. Urbancich at http://jmuvies.blogspot.com/