Is Shutter Island PDF Free Download?

The novel Shutter Island, written by Dennis Lehane and made into the Martin Scorsese film of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a psychological thriller that keeps the reader engaged. This article examines questions of trust in the film and its spectators through a discussion of cinematic devices that create ambiguity, apprehension, and suspicion. It argues that the film uses an allusion to the mechanical “eye” of a camera and a stage-managed fantasy embedded within its plot to explore its spectators’ and its own cinematic sense of suspicion. It also links pathological and therapeutic aspects of trust in ways that blur distinctions between trusting others and trusting oneself.

In the film, US Marshal Teddy Daniels visits Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane on Shutter Island to investigate a disappearance. His psychiatric investigation is complicated by his belief that the asylum’s chief doctor, Dr. Naehring, is actually Andrew Laddies, the man who murdered his wife.

Despite his law enforcement training and a strong desire to believe in the truth, Teddy is unable to separate reality from the delusions of his own mind. He may be able to save the lives of his two patients, but he will not be able to save himself from his own self-inflicted trauma. Unless he can face the truth, he will have to submit himself to a lobotomy. The film evokes the tension between the animistic violence of the madman and the reductive rationality of Descartes’ cogitator ergo sum.