-By Kevin Lally

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Martin Scorsese reportedly received the script for his new film Shutter Island while recording narration for a documentary on Val Lewton, the great producer of low-budget 1940s RKO horror films that generated suspense through the power of suggestion. Laeta Kalogridis’ adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel surely appealed to Scorsese’s love of Lewton, with its similarly eerie setting on an isolated, forbidding prison island harboring dark mysteries. The resulting movie is gorgeously crafted, as one would expect from the masterly Scorsese, but any one of Lewton’s films delivered double the chills at half the running time and a fraction of the budget.

Shutter Island was a departure for author Lehane, known for the Boston-based crime novels Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, each made into a successful film. It’s a Gothic-style psychological thriller set in 1954 and centered on a U.S. marshal, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), investigating the disappearance of a murderess from the high-security, island fortress of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, accessible only by ferry from Boston. Despite the solicitous manner of Ashecliffe overseer Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), Teddy and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) are still treated largely like intruders, leading them to suspect dark doings at the institution.

Teddy has his own demons—horrible memories of the piles of corpses he encountered at the Dachau concentration camp as a World War II soldier, then the death of his beloved wife (Michelle Williams) in a fire set by an arsonist. In fact, one of the reasons Teddy is at Ashecliffe is to track down that same arsonist, whom he believes is housed in the dreaded “Ward C.” As a hurricane buffets the island and strands him, Teddy becomes convinced that the hospital has links to the Nazis and Cold War experiments and his investigation turns increasingly perilous.

There are many more plot twists ahead, but already you can get a sense of how overcooked the narrative is. This stew of ’50s paranoia, medical mayhem and historical hysteria ultimately comes to a full boil and delivers some much-craved answers, but for a long stretch you sit there wondering if all the breakneck melodrama is going to make any sense (kind of like the current season of “Lost”). Oh, for the efficiency of a 70-minute Lewton movie like The 7th Victim.

With his residual baby face, DiCaprio looks like he’s play-acting in his ’50s trench-coat and fedora, which may even be the intention. But he remains an admirably committed (forgive the pun) actor, fully up to the intense demands of the material. Kingsley is smoothly insinuating as the possibly deceptive doctor in charge, Ruffalo makes an appealing sidekick, and Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, Robin Bartlett and the great Max von Sydow offer stellar cameos.

As you’d expect with Scorsese, technical contributions across the board are top-notch, from Robert Richardson’s dynamic cinematography to Dante Ferretti’s highly atmospheric production design to Thelma Schoonmaker’s dependably sharp editing. Unusual for Scorsese, the effective music score, supervised by Robbie Robertson, consists of often discordant passages from modern composers like Krzysztof Penderecki, Morton Feldman and John Adams. And Shutter Island itself, the spectacular Peddocks Island near Boston, deserves star billing too.