Of all the Super Bowl commercials last night, the one that stuck with me the most, surprisingly, did not involve the E*TRADE baby.

It was the preview for the new Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island, the film adaptation of author Dennis Lehane’s best-selling 2003 novel – a movie the Los Angeles Times suggests might be “too sophisticated and complex for younger audiences and too intense and genre-driven for many of the adults who support cinema by serious directors” and one Scorsese admits was not just another day in the director’s chair:

I tried to pull back a few times and not get so emotionally and psychologically involved… But this story, these characters — it was a very unsettling experience.

Why?

Shutter Island tells the story of Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule, two U.S. Marshalls who set up shop on a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts in order to investigate the disappearance of a murderess from the island’s “fortress-like hospital for the criminally insane,” and I imagine when one is a highly acclaimed filmmaker dealing with the subject of mental illness set against the backdrop of a pretty dark plot, one tends to get a bit stressed.

If we’re to think of Scorsese as Shutter Island‘s right-hand man, then we can think of the film’s lead actor, Golden Globe winner Leonardo DiCaprio, as its left, and DiCaprio seemed to experience the same kind of emotional journey filming Shutter Island as Scorsese had directing it:

There were moments on set where I definitely felt like we were going into uncharted territory [...] It was draining. It got to the point where it became more and more realistic the deeper it got — swerving away from anything stylistic and becoming more about human nature.

Like most movies that blend mental illness and entertainment, Shutter Island will probably be met with some degree of criticism from the mental health community; however, DiCaprio says there was a “doctor on-set to help the actors understand the point of view of someone who suffers from a mental illness,” so it will be interesting to see how – if at all – that understanding shows through on the big screen.

Shutter Island hits theaters February 19. Learn more at www.shutterisland.com.

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    Last reviewed: 8 Feb 2010