SHUTTER ISLAND

Martin Scorsese knows how to build dread, and for two hours he does. The setting is oppressive, the mood suffocating, and the film keeps you genuinely guessing — right up until you can start guessing correctly, which happens sooner than the filmmakers probably intended. Ben Kingsley is excellent. The craft is real.

But craft isn't the whole story here. The film stops mid-thriller to argue about whether God "loves violence" or "loves order," to draw parallels between Cold War America and Nazi Germany, and to flirt with socialism as a sympathetic idea — before revealing most of that as a red herring anyway. None of it strengthens the story, and some of it could mislead a viewer who isn't paying close attention. Add a genuinely depressing ending, and you have a well-made film that leaves you worse off, not better.

If you're an adult who wants a moody, well-crafted psychological thriller and can think critically about its detours, this one holds your attention. Everyone else should let it wait — or skip it. Wait for home, and watch it with your guard up.

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner arrive on an isolated, fortress-like psychiatric hospital, Ashcliffe, on Shutter Island. Their assignment: find a missing patient, a woman who drowned her own children. As Teddy digs into the hospital's practices, he begins to suspect the institution — and the island itself — are hiding something far larger than one missing patient. Visions of his dead wife, and of the concentration camp he helped liberate during the war, keep surfacing as he investigates. As in any good psychological drama, nothing here is quite what it seems — and that's where we'll leave it.

Three stars means real skill on screen, with real limits attached. Scorsese's setting and mood are genuinely powerful, and the film keeps you on the edge of your seat with some legitimate surprises. Ben Kingsley turns in a terrific performance.

But the script leans on red herrings and blind alleys that don't earn their runtime, and in a few places the music and acting tip into over-the-top territory, apparently reaching for suspense it doesn't need. Anyone familiar with plot structure will likely see where the story is headed by the second act. And the ending — the payoff for all that tension — is such a downer that it's hard to imagine most viewers walking away satisfied.

This film's title theme could be Pogo's old line: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Buried in the plot are real, if muddled, questions about human evil — but the movie surrounds them with a light humanist, depressing, nihilistic frame that never quite resolves into truth.

Along the way, characters argue that God's gift is violence and that God loves violence, arguments that are countered by others insisting God gives us order — but the film treats this less like a real inquiry into God's character and more like set dressing. It layers in politically correct, anti-American revisionist history too: references to Cold War-era psychiatric experiments and clumsy analogies between 1950s America and Nazi Germany, with socialism given a sympathetic hearing. None of this holds up — the film itself reveals these threads as red herrings — but a viewer who isn't paying close attention could walk away with a distorted picture of history, psychiatry, and God.

What the story does get right, even if unintentionally, is its diagnosis: everyone in it is a sinner, institutions included. The tragedy is that the filmmakers don't seem to have meant it that way, and offer no answer for the condition they've depicted. Scripture names the same condition and offers what this film cannot: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) — and grace beyond it, for those who seek it.

Scorsese and DiCaprio have made something skillfully unsettling — and something that leaves you with more confusion than conviction. The craft is real; so are the detours into bad theology and worse history, wrapped around an ending with no light in it. Our answer stands: wait for home — adults only. If you're planning family movie night instead, start with our latest.