Messrs. Scorsese and DiCaprio mess with your head, film-buff style - WARNING: SHUTTER ISLAND SPOILER

I enjoyed Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island a lot at last Monday's UK press screening, even if it needed to be a tad leaner. It even caused me to re-jig my original Top 10 Mindfuck Movies. My review is at the Fortean Times, and I won't write another one here (since 80% of Shadowlocked's readers are North American and have already seen the film, and the Brits have all read the American reviews by now).

But I did want to observe a nice moment of Scorsese vù that rather signals that [here's the spoiler] DiCaprio's U.S. Marshall is actually mad as a march hare, and imagining a whooole bunch of things that either aren't there or didn't happen the way he thinks they did...

Our first shot of DiCaprio in Shutter Island takes up exactly where the boyish actor's previous period-set film with Scorsese left off. At the end of The Aviator (2004),we leave OCD-crippled billionaire Howard Hughes stuck in one of his mental loops, talking to himself in a mirror, endlessly repeating 'Wave of the future' and waiting for the medics to arrive.

Wave of the future. Wave of the future... DiCaprio finishes The Aviator (2004) and starts Shutter Island (2010)

The fact that DiCaprio's Shutter Island character is so stressed-out is apparently due to the raging storm outside the ferry to the isle-bound mental institution - a nice veil over the truth about the character. But it just struck me as a nice film-buff in-joke that Scorsese would dovetail these two DiCaprio outings with the 'looney in the mirror' motif...