Summary
The film opens in the Boston Harbor Islands, 1954, where a passenger named Teddy is experiencing seasickness on a ship. Teddy steps out onto the deck and talks to his newly assigned partner, Chuck, whom Teddy learns is from Portland. Teddy tells Chuck that he lost his wife in a fire, and the two discuss their destination: Ashecliffe, a mental hospital for the criminally insane.
The ship’s captain tells Chuck and Teddy that the dock they are approaching is the island's only entry and exit point. On shore, a group of armed guards greet Chuck and Teddy, led by a security director named McPherson, who together chaperone the men up to Ashecliffe. When Teddy mentions that McPherson’s men look tense, McPherson says, “We all are.” Teddy notices barbed wire and an electrified perimeter during the drive.
Once inside, McPherson describes Ashecliffe's campus, comprised of Ward A (the men’s ward), Ward B (the women’s ward), and Ward C (an ex-military fort that houses the most dangerous patients). McPherson tells the men they will need both his and his doctor’s permission before entering Ward C. When McPherson demands that the men surrender their firearms, Teddy protests but eventually submits, noticing that Chuck’s gun had been improperly holstered in his waistband.
As McPherson accompanies the men to see the facility's head doctor, Dr. Cawley, Teddy sees a man raking the grass in ankle shackles and a woman making a hushing gesture. In Cawley's office, Teddy observes the paintings and drawings of patients on Cawley’s wall, who explains that the goal of the facility is to rehabilitate the clinically insane. When Cawley tells them of an escaped patient named Rachel Solando who drowned her children, Teddy gets a headache. Cawley explains that Rachel’s delusions have taken on a “fictional structure,” in which everyone around her must play a part.
The men search Rachel's cell, and find a pair of shoes left behind. Teddy also finds a handwritten note that says “The Law of 4. Who is 67?” The men investigate the cafeteria and Teddy becomes angry when Cawley seems reluctant to hand over the documents necessary for Teddy to conduct his investigation. Later, surveying the rocky coast, McPherson maintains that there are no possible hiding places along the cliffs.
Next, the men question the orderlies to determine how Rachel escaped. A tense orderly named Glenn admits he breached protocol by going to the bathroom. Teddy asks if anything out of the ordinary happened at group therapy, and learns that Rachel’s primary doctor has left for a vacation. Cawley invites Teddy and Chuck for cigars later in his private chamber, where they also find Cawley’s colleague, Dr. Jeremiah Naehring, listening to Gustav Mahler’s "Quartet for Piano and Strings in A Minor."
Naehring calls Teddy a “man of violence” — what he claims is his research specialty — causing Teddy to flash back to witnessing a German Nazi soldier die in World War II. When Naehring asks Teddy if he believes in God, Teddy becomes angry and taunts him for being German. When the doctors once again refuse to furnish Teddy with the documents needed for his investigation, Teddy storms out of the office in a rage.
Analysis
From its opening frames, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island manipulates the viewer into accepting the events of the plot according to the careful and rigid delusions of its protagonist, Teddy Daniels / Andrew Laeddis. These delusions are grandiose enough to sustain a Hollywood genre film entirely on their own, and Scorsese's direction works tirelessly throughout to convince the viewer that the film will follow the investigative disclosure of a Nazi conspiracy at a corrupt insane asylum in 1954, rather than Teddy's own dysphoria. As a result, the film incorporates elements belonging to a number of popular "B-movie" genres: psychological thriller, procedural, film noir, domestic melodrama, and Grand Guignol horror.
Many details in the film's early scenes are intended as clues to suggest that everyone at Ashecliffe is performing for Teddy's sake—what Dr. Cawley will later describe as "radical, cutting-edge role-play." Dr. Sheehan, who plays the role of Teddy's partner Chuck, initially tells Teddy he is from Portland, although later he claims to be from Seattle. Dr. Sheehan also fails to properly holster his sidearm, which suggests he is not actually a trained U.S. Marshal. Later, the viewer learns that the men's guns are merely plastic toys, rendering McPherson's confiscation of them meaningless.
Early clues aside, Scorsese structures the film so that first-time viewers will follow the "surface-level interpretation" of the plot, which is a product of Teddy's own delusions; only upon rewatching do the ominous double-meanings of certain symbols come fully to light. For example, Scorsese trains his camera on two key images when McPherson takes Teddy and Chuck to see Dr. Cawley: a man raking grass, and a woman making a hushing gesture. The man raking grass foreshadows the eventual futility of Cawley's efforts to break Teddy free of his own delusions, and the hushing woman reflects the fact that everyone around Teddy is intentionally withholding the truth from him.
Teddy's headache upon learning that Rachel Solando murdered her children is the first indication that the name is somehow connected to his past. Cawley describes Rachel's delusions as taking on a "fictional structure" in order to provoke Teddy into recognizing his own delusions, but Teddy remains committed to his present investigation. Only at the film's end does Teddy understand the significance of the two messages he finds in Rachel's cell. "The Law of 4" is a reference to four deaths from his traumatic past, and "Who is 67?" alludes to Ashecliffe's 67th and most dangerous patient—Teddy himself.
Dr. Naehring's German ancestry is a red herring that initially leads the viewer to believe that a Nazi conspiracy may be at hand. However, the fact that Naehring is listening to Mahler—a musician whose work was famously banned by the Nazis—is a subtle clue that this is not the case. Teddy's memories of military service, in particular his presence at the liberation of Dachau, is an invocation of historical atrocity that looms over the film, which is set in the period immediately following the close of World War II. Whether or not Teddy is at heart a "violent" man is one of the driving psychological questions of the story, which surfaces again in the film's final lines.
