Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Shutter Island
2010 · Martin Scorsese · Shutter Island on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the objects on the tables and in people's hands. (setting)
Scorsese fills the interview rooms and corridors with small props, cups, files, glasses, and keeps them in sharp focus. Details are placed with unusual care.
Payoff: The film asks you to read its objects as closely as its faces. In the reading: the readable image. Deleuze calls this the readable image: a shot you must decipher rather than simply watch.
Look for the hard light falling straight down onto faces. (light)
Richardson keys faces from almost directly above, haloing heads while the background burns out to white. It turns every corridor conversation into an interrogation and cuts people loose from the rooms they stand in.
Payoff: The lighting isolates Teddy from everyone around him and makes every talk feel like questioning.
Listen for the music that arrives before anyone speaks. (sound)
There is no conventional score. Robertson compiled existing pieces: droning avant-garde strings that press in, then a sudden Dinah Washington record or Richter's aching elegy. The soundtrack lurches between menace and tenderness.
Payoff: You feel dread and grief as separate weather systems, pushing on each other all film.
Notice when the color changes: lurid greens, bleached whites, gray-blue. (light)
The hospital and storm run hot and saturated. Interiors turn bleached and overexposed. Some scenes drain to a cold gray-blue.
Payoff: Color tells you the mood of a scene before anyone speaks.
Watch DiCaprio's hands and jaw when Kingsley speaks to him. (performance)
DiCaprio plays mounting physical strain: winces, twitches, sudden outbursts. Kingsley stays silken and paternal, his warmth and menace held perfectly level.
Payoff: Both performances are pitched so you cannot settle on what either man wants.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the weather and the light. Notice what each room does to the people standing in it.