The story begins with two United States Marshals going to investigate the escape of a female patient from an institution on a solitary island in the middle of the sea where mentally ill criminals are sent. The scenes on the ship, which must have been made using Hollywood’s high-tech computer graphics, somehow look fake and cheap, giving off a perplexing impression from the beginning. Somehow these two people who seem to be meeting each other for the first time partake in this dangerous mission together, though the marshal with subordinate status (performed by Mark Ruffalo) casually asks his boss (Leonardo DiCaprio!!) personal questions. The only way to get to the island is with a ferry, but when the marshals arrive on the island, they must forfeit their weapons to the institution’s official guard and enter what seems like a very dangerous place without any weapons. The institution’s courtyard is beautiful, but all the patients are chained together and stare at the two marshals with somewhat strange facial expressions. The director of the institution also appears to be acting unnaturally to the two of them. Over the course of the investigation, the protagonist marshal Leonardo realizes that not only is the female patient missing, but another male patient, who is extremely violent and dangerous, is also missing; no one in the hospital, however, informs him of this. One mentally ill patient Leonardo interviews seizes the opportunity that nobody else is watching to hand Leonardo a note saying, “Run away!” in a moment of recovered sanity. The situation becomes stranger and stranger.
The next day, for some reason, the female patient who disappeared comes back, but there is no real explanation of how she disappeared or came back. However, since Leonardo and his partner have completed the mission, they intend to leave when a hurricane suddenly attacks the island, so they decide to stay one more day on the island. The next morning, rumors spread that the ward accommodating the most dangerous patients on the island was destroyed; the marshals go to the ward, but are unable to grasp what is happening on the island and become increasingly confused. Leonardo still appears to be fearless, but finally the subordinate marshal Mark says, “We both need to work to escape from here.” However, Mark also suddenly disappears. Was he kidnapped by someone? And where does the extremely dangerous, mentally ill criminal who disappeared lurk? While desperately searching for Mark, Leonardo discovers a woman hiding in a cave. This woman tells Leonardo that she is the female patient who escaped and that the director presented a different woman in her place to make it look like she returned. Even more terrifying, she was a doctor at that institution that experimented on the mentally ill patients, but when she objected to experimenting on living people, she was locked away as a mental illness patient at the institution to keep the truth from being exposed. From that cave, Leonardo sees a lighthouse he had never visited before and guard officials carrying guns. Leonardo slips into this lighthouse and learns the surprising truth.
Inside this lighthouse, there is a great plot twist and again a feeling of, “What??” When you know the conclusion and watch the movie, you see everything from a different angle and everything down to the minor details makes sense. In other words, the audience is skillfully deceived for two hours. Maybe the director felt sorry for the audience for tricking them until now, so he puts in another twist at the very end that makes the audience question whether they were truly deceived. The movie deliberately makes it ambiguous whether the actions Leonardo takes at the end when he finally realizes he is not able to escape from the island are due to insanity or a resignation to his fate. I think director Martin Scorsese ended the movie this way to intentionally confuse the audience.
According to him, “A story that’s difficult to understand? Isn’t that wonderful? Viewers will go back to the theater in order to understand, so this movie will be financially successful.”
The main character performed by Leonardo is depicted as being haunted by the scenes of Jews whom he had liberated from Nazi camps. America did not become a battleground, but it is a historical fact that many soldiers were wounded and killed. In addition, the movie depicts lobotomy, which was an accepted medical treatment to mental illness in America during those times. For example, it is said that Rosemary Kennedy of the notable Kennedy family suffered from some kind of mental disorder. Since her violent nature and mood disorder grew worse, her father Joseph had a behind-the-scenes lobotomy operation performed on her in 1941. This operation further reduced her cognitive ability, and as a result, she lived in an institution until she died in 2005. This ominous movie may not necessarily be unrealistic.