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Martin Scorsese's latest film "Shutter Island" can be summarized by one sentence:"What happens at Shutter Island remains in Shutter Island".

The biggest criticism of Shutter Island is that the movie is too long and too philosophical, and that the last fifteen minutes are the only part of the film which catches the attention of the audience. But the questions being asked by the film are questions that are still relevant today.
The film opens up with a ferry chugging through a murky fog towards an island somewhere off the coast of Boston. The island, when it comes into view, resembles Alcatraz(even the rocks and the large granite fortresses on the island tell the audience that those who visit never return). The time is 1954, certainly a time viewed by many as the dark ages (what with the McCarthy era, the cold war, and the shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima). As for DiCaprio, his role as a U.S. marshal seems typecast at first...a hard-boiled detective whose wife has died, who has constant remainders of the death camps he freed during the war...he is seasick, he has constant migraines, and when he sleeps, he has nightmares in which he either envisions his dead wife, or the corpses of the dead piled up at Auschwitz.
So like any good detective, he carries within his soul demons which make his existence one in which every day he is moving deeper and deeper into the bottom of Dante's Hell.
Without giving away too much of the plot, we are told that he was sent there to investigate the disappearance of a female patient, a mother who was confined for murdering her three children. To state anything else would be to give away the entire movie. Be patient. Be very, very patient.
As I watched the film, my mind kept making references to Edgar Allen Poe:
The human tombs where the mentally ill are kept, the constant emergence of ghosts in DiCaprio's dreams, the continuous flashbacks to death camps and corpses, dead children, the Daliesque ghost visions of his dead wife, the German Psychologist (played brilliantly by Max Von Sydow) who, when viewed through DiCaprio's imagination probably performed medical experiments on Jewish children, and the constantly murkiness of each frame (everything is damp and cold and indifferent as granite). Then there are the philosophical arguments:
is it better to lobotomize the violently mentally ill, or tranquilize them. Then there is the creepy soundtrack. The best part of the soundtrack for me was when Max Von Sydow is listening to a violin concerto by Mahler, but the tonality of the concerto is as if someone is slowly strangling a cat. My wife said to me, "I think there's something wrong with the soundtrack." I thought to myself, "No, This is a not too subtle hint that everything in DiCaprio's world is out of kilter."
If you do go to Shutter Island, when you arrive home, reread Poe's "The Telltale Heart." Poe's short stories were about the subconscious mind, and how the subconscious can create it's own reality. There is nothing more terrifying then the mind creating an alternate reality, being a patient in a mental institution talking to people who are non existent, or someone whose mind cannot differentiate between a toaster and a television set.
As far as the 1950's being the dark ages, we now send the mentally ill off to state penitentiaries, or force them to sleep in cardboard shelters in darkness. What we don't want to see, our minds eventually block out.
One question you will need to ask yourself as you leave the movie:"Is the world that I am Living in the real world, or is it a total creation of my imagination?"
Only the shadow knows, and he's not telling.