By TERRENCE RAFFERTY


Martin Scorsese’s dark, twisty detective thriller “Shutter Island” is set in 1954, in the full flowering of what W.H. Auden had, just a few years earlier, called the Age of Anxiety. “I don’t know, maybe I’m stuck in that time,” Mr. Scorsese said recently, sounding a little weary as he talked about a film that “started out as an entertainment, though I guess I don’t really know how to do that,” he said. “It always seems to become something else.”

“‘The Departed’ was that way too,” he added . He is 67 now, and has had, by any measure, as satisfying a decade as a filmmaker of his age and experience can reasonably expect .

Three years ago “The Departed” won him his first Oscar, after more than four decades of moviemaking ; he can afford to rest. But he is still, it appears, determined to continue making the kind of film that will, like “Shutter Island,” become “something else.”

Based on an exceptionally tricky 2003 mystery novel by Dennis Lehane, “Shutter Island” wears its somethingelseness proudly, even defiantly. It’s a true oddity, an outlier, as isolated and enigmatic as the gloomy, rain-whipped island on which the action takes place. The hero, a federal marshal named Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a tormented soul . Teddy’s emotional troubles manifest themselves, for most of the film, as very bad dreams - many of them about his dead wife - and migraines.

“When I read the script,” Mr. Scorsese said, “I was just taken by the character, felt very empathetic with him.”

Teddy, accompanied by his curiously passive partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), is on Shutter Island to investigate a disappearance. This unprepossessing chunk of rock in Boston Harbor, houses an asylum for the criminally insane, one of whom has somehow managed to vanish from her cell. We learn early on that Teddy might have other agendas: the man he believes killed his wife may be an inmate there, and he’s suspicious of the motives of the asylum’s psychiatric staff .


‘Shutter Island’
evokes a ‘feeling of a
trap, a labyrinth.’


What makes “Shutter Island” feel so peculiar for this director to have made isn’t the troubled protagonist, or the detective-movie plot mechanics. It’s the claustrophobia, the tight, hermetic, locked-down structure that’s so unusual for Mr. Scorsese, whose films are generally a lot more expansive. As Mr. DiCaprio, who has starred in all four of the nondocumentary features Mr. Scorsese has directed since 2002, explained, “With scripts like ‘Gangs of New York’ and ‘The Aviator’ there’s a little more flexibility, certain things that can be done to reshape the character, but in scripts like ‘Shutter Island’ there are too many interlocking segments. If you take one piece out, the story starts to fall apart.”

Most of the film was shot at an abandoned mental institution in Medfield, Massachusetts, which had, Mr. Scorsese said, “the feeling of a trap, a labyrinth ? a labyrinth of the mind, which is what I wanted.” Mr. Scorsese’s movies have always been fueled by nervous energy and huge uprushes of adrenaline, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine him doing without some kind of emotional turbulence, even if he has to induce it by sheer force of will. Or stimulants may sometimes be required. With Mr. Scorsese’s filmmaking, the drugs of choice are primarily the memory of old movies .

“I love memory,” he said, “I mean, I’m a preservationist.” So when he talks about “Shutter Island,” he also inevitably needs to speak of remembered films like those of Jacques Tourneur, who made the doomy, complex noir “Out of the Past” (1947).

He finds a way to remain charged up, by any means necessary, even if it involves making a film as relentlessly and baroquely interior as “Shutter Island,” which has the nightmare architecture of a Piranesi prison. Whatever works. And what works for Mr. Scorsese, usually, is some form of unease. He may or may not be stuck in the ‘50s, but for him it’s always, one way or another, an age of anxiety.

‘‘I love memory,’’ Martin Scorsese says. ‘‘I’m a preservationist.’’ / TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES