The mere sight of the ocean seems to send director Martin Scorsese into a cold sweat. We haven't seen him turn out a movie so rabid with tension and paranoia since the waterlogged and rather hysterical Cape Fear in 1991. This is a far better movie.

It's 1954, and war-haunted US Marshall Leonardo DiCaprio takes his slightly less intense partner Mark Ruffalo to a remote government-run psychiatric institution situated far from the mainland. One of the patients has gone missing, and since this particular cuckoo’s-nest is exclusively occupied by murderers and psychopaths the habitually tense atmosphere of the asylum has been ratcheted up several notches.

Co-operation is given only grudgingly; our heroes are disarmed by a phalanx of guards at the gate, whose cold welcome is matched by head shrinks Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow. The patients are slightly more co-operative, but their testimony is predictably suspect. Even so, DiCaprio begins to wonder if there might not be some basis for their paranoia…

The inmates are scared witless, the staff want the investigators off the island as soon as possible and something very strange seems to be going on in the off-limits lighthouse beyond the main penitentiary.

On a very contemporary note, DiCaprio and Ruffalo begin to suspect that the very terrors they fought against in World War II have been institutionalised at this remote and secretive facility. Are the patients right about the terrible 'lighthouse experiments' conducted on them, advancing science in the midst of a moral vacuum? Are those in charge of the facility all that they seem? But it gets increasingly hard to think matters through when DiCaprio realises that he is being systematically drugged…

Shutter Island would be a rousing and slightly gothic chiller with 45 minutes lopped off, but its central characters are neither numerous nor weighty enough to justify its run-time, and the business they have to convey could have been carried out far more economically.

But for all that it sags woefully in the middle, the film's conclusion is a first class mind-warp, and to say any more on the matter would be to spoil it.

Our first shot of DiCaprio is practically a follow-on from his previous film with Martin Scorsese, The Aviator: we see him looking intensely at himself in a mirror, and this is more than a mere in-joke, it seems. DiCaprio's relentlessly boyish appearance continues to play against him in roles as dark as this, and it's to his credit that his skill as an actor can get past this obstacle

Ruffalo provides a genuinely chilling and memorable screen presence, whilst Ted Levine turns in his scariest performance since playing Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs. His conversation with DiCaprio in the jeep is one of the creepiest since the conclusion of Lord Of War. Kingsley, Von Sydow and the rest of the cast are somewhat more constricted by the requirements of the genre, but provide effective support.

Scorsese's choices of pre-existing musical segments provides some of the most intense ambience since Howard Shore's work on Se7en, and the overall effect of this combines with Robert Richardson's gloomy cinematography to create a genuinely claustrophobic atmosphere.

At 90 minutes, Shutter Island might have been close to a noir masterpiece, but it's still very much worth a shiver.