The Underrated Leonardo DiCaprio Suspense Thriller Blazing Up Netflix
A fun if slightly frustrating thing about Netflix is that it always has a selection of Martin Scorsese movies, but the ones available are constantly changing. The Irishman is always there, of course, because Netflix paid big money for it, but other than that, it can be kind of unpredictable. You're at the whims of the streaming licensing deals. Sometimes Mean Streets will be on Netflix, and sometimes it won't. The Departed is usually on the streamer, but you'll have to check and make sure before you commit to watching it. If After Hours is ever on there, you've got to watch it — it's so good.
Currently, Scorsese has a new limited series on Netflix called Pretend It's a City, where he talks about New York City with his friend, cultural critic Fran Lebowitz. Plus, there are a handful of classic Marty movies like GoodFellas, Taxi Driver, and the epic Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home to stream. But one Scorsese film arrived on Netflix on February 1 — and it isn't considered to be among his absolute best movies but is still very good and has high rewatch value. That's probably why the underrated flick is currently sitting at number eight on Netflix's list of top ten most-watched movies in the U.S. It's Shutter Island – Scorsese's fourth collaboration with star Leonardo DiCaprio.
Shutter Island continues to captivate viewers
Shutter Island is a psychological thriller from 2010 that's the closest Scorsese has ever come to making a horror movie. In the film, DiCaprio plays Edward "Teddy" Daniels, a U.S. Marshal investigating the disappearance of a woman named Rachel Solando, who drowned her three children. She vanished from the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, located on Boston Harbor's Shutter Island, in 1954. The investigation starts strange and gets even stranger, as Teddy uncovers a conspiracy of denial and coverups that gets increasingly complex and confusing until the truth is revealed in the film's devastating third-act twist.
The movie is based on a novel by acclaimed writer and TV producer Dennis Lehane, with the script written by Laeta Kalogridis, who went on to create the TV series Altered Carbon and write the screenplay for Alita: Battle Angel.
Shutter Island has an okay Rotten Tomatoes score of 68 percent, with The Spectator's Deborah Ross summing up the critical consensus: "It's not a serious film and it's not even an especially suspenseful film but it is fun, in a Dr. Caligari sort of way." Ross' read is a pretty accurate one: Shutter Island is one of Scorsese's most purely entertaining films, a crowd-pleasing psychological thriller that works well whether the viewer knows the twist or not. It earned $294.8 million worldwide, and is Scorsese's third-highest-grossing film ever, behind The Departed and Cape Fear.
Coincidentally, Shutter Island is actually one of two Leonardo DiCaprio movies from 2010 to arrive on Netflix in February 2021; the other is Christopher Nolan's Inception, another big hit from an auteur director that could make for a fun compare-and-contrast double feature with Shutter Island.