Shutter Island

Because watching a movie is already a kind of divine madness - a collective dream - directors need to approach the portrayal of nightmares, hallucinations and drug trips with circumspection. Dreams devalue the cinema experience by artificially inflating the odds. Even a novel that's as gripping and well written as Dennis Lehane's gothic thriller Shutter Island can falter on the screen, since viewers need to feel like they can trust what they're seeing.

With typical panache, Martin Scorsese (and screenwriter Laeta Kalogradis) goes marching in where angels fear to tread in his adaptation. Scorsese's muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, as US Marshall Teddy Daniels, arrives out of the mist with his colleague Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) onto a remote, windswept island in Boston Harbour that houses Ashecliffe - a high-security asylum for the criminally insane. Daniels is here to investigate the disappearance of a patient, a multiple murderess who has "excaped" from an apparently locked room.

It's 1954, and conspiracy is in the air. If Ashecliffe's dapper chief psychiatrist, Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley), isn't hiding something from Daniels, then Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow), a German émigré, certainly is. And there's a hurricane closing in that will cut them all off from the mainland, bringing with it the risk that the lunatics could take over the asylum.

Daniels has a beef against the mentally ill: his wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) has died in a fire lit by a crazed arsonist. And it's his dreams of Dolores, mixed up with horrific memories of having liberated the concentration camp of Dachau, that invade the narrative and may stretch the viewer's faith in where the story is going. These lengthy fantasy sequences are visually impressive, but wearying.

The cast is first-rate, with Jackie Earl Haley, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson also appearing. Scorsese directs with fluid grace, drawing freely from the Hitchcock school of suspense, where violent storms, dark corridors and vertiginous staircases reflect and amplify the protagonist's mind-set. This is the relatively entertaining late-period Scorsese of The Departed rather than the overwrought and ponderous late-period Scorsese of Gangs of New York and The Aviator. It's just a shame that what begins as an intriguing mystery in a forebidding location gets lost in a labyrinth of paranoia and psychobabble. When the solution to the mystery is revealed, it's meant to rattle us to the core; but it's actually something of a misfire. Nick Dent