“Seen any walking nightmares lately, marshal?” a woman asks deputy marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) late in director Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island." She’s a psychiatrist, although she might as well be a psychic: Daniels has been prowling around the creepy corridors of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and he’s witnessed enough scary sights to fill a month’s worth of bad dreams.
It’s 1954, and psychiatric hospitals are not far from the dismal days of ice baths, crudely administered electro-shock treatments and other atrocities. In Ashecliffe’s Ward C, patients are still stripped naked and locked up in filthy, dark cells where their bodies rot and their minds deteriorate. The conditions in Ashecliffe’s other buildings are slightly better, although nobody’s going to mistake it for a country-club prison.
Adapted from Dennis Lehane’s novel, “Shutter” is a freak show with artsy pretensions.
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