Review: 'Shutter Island' is creepy, terrific

(CNN) -- Could insanity be contagious? Marooned on an island with only the criminally insane for company, how long before you doubted yourself?

Certainly something is not right on Shutter Island. Some miles off the Massachusetts coast, this is a barren slab of gray rock, home to a hospital that is also a prison. U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) arrive to look into the disappearance of a patient.

According to head psychiatrist Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), Rachel Solando simply disappeared from her locked cell without a trace -- she didn't even take her shoes.

Someone is lying, and Teddy intends to find out who, and why. But he has a few hidden motives of his own.

Scorsese is sticking with the serious pulp mode that brought him sizeable success with "The Departed," but the crisply ironic symmetries of the cop thriller have been jettisoned for an altogether murkier psychological investigation.

And the more incredible "Shutter Island" gets, the more energized Scorsese seems. It's a paranoia movie, rife with guilty secrets, nightmare visions and gothic horrors -- his masterly variation on Sam Fuller's legendary Cold War freak-out, "Shock Corridor."

Ashcliffe is one of those asylums with serious plumbing issues. A storm is coming in. Water drips from every faltering light fixture, and the clinical staff are more sinister than the patients. (Another doctor is played by Max von Sydow, and in an inspired bit of casting, the head warden is Ted Levine, Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Lambs.")

The mood is jittery, ominous, disorienting. The marshals' investigation feels out of sync, as if they're walking into a setup, but they keep digging deeper. What else are they going to do? There's no way back until the storm blows over.

Pinched, pale and increasingly perturbed, DiCaprio is plagued with migraines and bad dreams. He could be one of inmates if he's not careful. A World War II vet, he's haunted by memories -- his company liberated Dachau -- and in nocturnal communication with the charred remains of his late wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams).

These nightmares are among the most audaciously expressionist scenes Scorsese has given us, simultaneously chilling and nearly beautiful in their exquisite horror. Embers fall like snowflakes over a marital embrace; a dead child stares accusingly from a heap of murdered concentration camp victims ... and blinks.

iReport: B+ for "Shutter Island"

Starting with a locked room mystery -- the oldest head-scratcher in the book -- Scorsese expands the search until we have covered every nook and cranny of that island. This may be pulp, a charade even, but it's pulp that evokes the great horrors of the modern age -- the bomb, the Holocaust, eugenics -- all those atrocities we file away somewhere deep in the back of our minds so that we can still look each other in the eye.

Like Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull" and Howard Hughes in "The Aviator," Teddy wants to break out of his own head, because the ultimate locked room is our own hard wiring -- that's the horror and the pity of it.

With striking performances across the board and exemplary contributions from cinematographer Robert Richardson, editor Thelma Schoonmaker and music arranger Robbie Robertson (drawing on Mahler, Penderecki, Cage, Adams and Ligeti), "Shutter Island" comes too late for 2009 Oscar consideration. But it's easily the best movie of the year so far.