Shutter Island is not an easy movie to enjoy. I think that’s intentional, but that doesn’t make the experience any less unpleasant. It succeeds maybe a little too well in creating a grim and disorienting ambiguity between fantasy and reality that allows the viewer no relief or catharsis in either world.

Leo DiCaprio plays a US Marshall assigned to the peculiar case of an escaped prisoner on an island devoted to the criminally insane. He brings some baggage to the case – memories of WWII and its atrocities and even more painful memories of the young wife he lost in a suspicious fire. These memories and their meanings confront him with increasing urgency as the case unravels.

The movie’s full impact is dependent on some very spoilable plot twists, so I’ll skip any further comment on the story and say that while Scorcese is a steady hand and the performances are uniformly strong, the resolution for me was unsatisfying and pat, and in some ways unworthy of the director or his cast. I blame the source material, an airport novel I haven’t had the pleasure of reading. It’s a worthy effort that is undone by a flimsy, dime-store understanding of human psychology. I guess I’d put it in the category of interesting failures.

In the end, if I had caught this at 3am on cable and I didn’t know that it was a Scorcese picture, I probably would have liked it more. I expect a lot of Mister Scorcese, and for that reason it’s a bit of a letdown. It’s definitely worth a matinee or an add to your Netflix queue, but I don’t think there’s any reason to run out to see it. The studio had to know that too, or the film would have gotten released in time for Oscar consideration instead of being dumped in the first-quarter deadzone.