Shutter Island is one of those films where you can watch it over 10 times and still find yourself Googling to have the ending explained. And it turns out you’re not alone.
There are a few movies that leave you scratching your head for days on end.
You know you just watched it, you thought you were following the plot completely and then the end happens and you’re like… Huh?
The 18 most confusing Hollywood blockbusters have now been revealed thanks to OnBuy.com which analysed monthly search volumes for ‘explainers’.
Turns out Shutter Island has over 55,700 people a month Googling for further explanations.
That’s a lot of people watching that movie a month considering it came out 10 years ago – but that’s beside the point. What does the ending actually mean?
Shutter Island stars DiCaprio as Edward “Teddy” Daniels, who is apparently a US marshal who is investigating a psychiatric facility on the island after a patient goes missing.
Only Teddy is not actually Teddy; it turns out that he is inmate Andrew Laeddis, a killer. The ending of Shutter Island reveals that DiCaprio’s character is in fact a patient himself, committed to the Shutter Island facility after murdering his wife (Michelle Williams) because she went insane and killed their children.
Two of the doctors at the facility, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), created a roleplaying game – in which Laeddis (DiCaprio) played a US marshal – in the hopes it would break him free from his own delusions. The role play fails: after a brief recovery, Laeddis relapses into insanity and is therefore taken off to be lobotomised.
So, by the end of the film you have been following Teddy’s investigation only to realise he’s not actually Teddy and you have to re-evaluate everything you just watched.
To make things even more confusing, DiCaprio’s character utters one final line , before he falls into the clutches of the lobotomists:“This place makes me wonder, which would be worse – to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”
This line has been a talking point for years, one that even Dicaprio doesn’t fully understand.
Or maybe he’s just lying so we continue to Google his film.
The Guardian spoke to one of these was Scorsese’s psychiatric adviser, Professor James Gilligan of New York University, about those cryptic last words. Apparently, they mean:
“I feel too guilty to go on living. I’m not going to actually commit suicide, but I’m going to vicariously commit suicide by handing myself over to these people who’re going to lobotomise me.”
Gilligan told the publication that people who kill others in the way Andrew has, don’t realise what they’re doing at the time. If treatment returns them to their senses, guilt may then overwhelm them.
And my mind is blown.
Image: Phoenix Pictures via Shutter Island