Shutter Island was one of the most interesting movies that I have seen for this class. This movie definitely gets the viewer thinking, especially at the end when it is revealed that everyone at the ward has taken pills that have hallucinogenics in them, and even the main character, Teddie, starts to break down.
Towards the end of the movie, Teddie is convinced that his partner, Chuck, was taken away to the lighthouse and wants to find him there. However, when he gets to the lighthouse, he sees the main psychiatrist, John Cawley, tells him that Edward Daniels isn’t his real name and that his real name is Andrew Laeddis and that he was the 67th patient at the ward and was the most dangerous patient that was there. Cawley has also figured out that Edward Daniels and Rachel Solando are anagrams for Andrew Laeddis and Dolores Chanal.
Throughout the whole movie, Teddie has been having migraines along with having weird visions of his wife and one of his kids. Towards the end of the movie, Teddie starts to have a dream about what the past really was, where he was under the name of Andrew Laeddis. In that dream, he started out inside his house in Oklahoma wondering where his kids are. He asks his wife, Dolores, about where she thinks where they might be only to find out that his wife drowned his children in the water. After grabbing the bodies, Laeddis grieves over them and then murders his wife because of what she did.
This film definitely was an interesting watch for me mainly because of the twist reveal that occurred toward the end. If there was a film from this semester that I would compare this film with, it would be Cache because of the ambiguous messages that it brings across. Both films rely heavily on the viewer’s interpretation on how these unanswered questions get answered. They also have unanswered questions on specific people, more specifically, in Shutter Island, it was about figuring out who the real Rachel Solando is, while Cache focused more on who was the stalker that was stalking Georges and Anne. While both of these films had different tones to them, both managed to pull off the ambiguous endings remarkably well.
Lauren's Movie Blog 