Shutter Island

We saw Shutter Island this evening, another film born out of the Martin Scorsese-Leonardo Di Caprio partnership. With its depictions of madness and lunatic asylums and violent acts, this film cannot be described as being enjoyable, but it is good entertainment. Di Caprio acts brilliantly, Ben Kingsley puts in a strong performance, Scorsese keeps the tension taut and the musical score adds further to the brew. If I were a film critic, I’d have two quibbles with this film. The first is that the set-up seems familiar. Personally, I couldn’t get the basic plotting device of Sixth Sense out of my head. The second is that there is what writers call a ‘POV’ (point of view) problem in the film. The viewer is invited into a character’s delusional world and remains there for much of the film, but towards the end the POV switches to a more objective stance (the equivalent of third person in literature). There is, of course, nothing to stop a director doing this, but the brilliance of Sixth Sense, if I recall it correctly, is that the POV never changes – only the audience’s perception of what it was they were seeing.