Beginning with a novel by Dennis Lehane that was adapted into a screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, director Martin Scorsese built an intentional lurid psychological melodrama filled with existential trick shots and mental trap doors. After a decade of intensely focused cinematic storytelling, Shutter Island is the look of a great director at play, indulging himself in a grandiose attempt to recreate the sort of moody film noirs and florid Technicolor wonders that captivated him as a youth, their boldest, brashest qualities exponentially expanded by the happily insidious magnification of nostalgic memory. Scorsese paints the corners in shadow with a fervor that suggests he’s auditioning to part of Val Lewton’s stable of actors and constructs his narrative with the sort of Swiss watch precision that made Alfred Hitchcock an icon. The storyline is a cascade of unlikely madness. While other directors have approached adaptations of Lehane’s works blind to their improbabilities, Scorsese revels in them. He directs the film with a headlong joy in its spiritual anarchy. Every new character is an opportunity to spin the looking glass. It’s no accident that the actors making the briefest appearances–Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley and, having the time of his life, Ted Levine–are also the ones making the greatest impact. Their roles are jack-in-the-box game pieces, springing up in startling fashion to serve the machinations on the greater board. There’s also another exceptional performance by Leonardo DiCaprio, who proves his mettle anew in each collaboration with Scorsese. His haunted U.S. Marshal has some of the same harrowing tension as Billy Costigan in The Departed, but with a undertow of barely suppressed anguish. The role is wrenching and precarious, and DiCaprio unlocks it with fierce ingenuity. For all its feverish grimness, the movie is a devilish lark, an aspect underscored in the final act when the psychiatrist played by Ben Kingsley explains the ludicrously complicated plots within plots with a studious nonchalance. The emotions may be wildly intense, but in the end, the film itself seems to argue, it’s only a movie. Shutter Island just so happens to be a movie that’s clearly been made by a master of the form.