Shutter Island and The Truth

My husband and I watched Shutter Island last weekend. It was a spur of the moment decision that we don’t even know which movie to watch. After going through the list of movies the theater had, we finally went for Shutter Island. It was a little dragging in the beginning. There was nothing much going on except U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), went to the Ashecliff Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island. They were investigating about the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient who vanished into thin air from a locked and highly secured room.

Teddy Daniels had a theory of his own and thought that the hospital was doing human experiments to their patients to make them more responsive and manageable. He wanted to uncover the truth at the lighthouse where he thinks all the human experimenting was going on, but he was surprised to uncover the truth about himself instead.

The doctors decided to try the role play experiment hoping to bring him back into his sanity and go along with his delusion. Apparently, he murdered his manic depressive wife after she drowned their three children in the lake behind their house. She was begging to him that she wants to let go that he decided to shot him. The doctors successfully made him see the truth and one by one it started coming back to him about that day that his wife killed his children, but it wasn’t for too long. The next day, he had a relapse.

It was indeed an ending I did not see coming. It made me ask, how much pain and truth can a person handle before he/she eventually loses his/her mind? Whether Teddy Daniels was trying to hide from the truth by creating a fantasy in his mind or block the pain, we will never know.

People deal with pain differently. Some after a few months realizes that things happened for a reason and learn how to move on. That is why the support of the family in this time of need is very important. Some people also seek for a psychiatrist’s help while others deal with it on its own and in the end lose track of the truth and reality, and they start creating a delusion to permanently escape from pain.