Martin Scorsese's only horror movie to date, the 1991 Cape Fear remake, was one of his least satisfying directorial outings. Although Robert De Niro brought a dark charm to the movie as Max Cady, Scorsese's work felt tenuous and unsure of the genre, and the whole film rolled off the rails and exploded into a shrill, overblown mess. With Shutter Island, Scorsese—with 20 amazing years of experience behind him—has crafted a much more assured and creepy horror movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio (with a thick Boston accent and a bulldoggish tenacity) plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal in the 1950s investigating the disappearance of a mental patient from an institution on a small, remote Massachusetts island. Teamed with a new partner (Mark Ruffalo, gregariously shrugging his way through the sidekick role), Daniels must uncover the secrets of Shutter Island even as the staff of the mental hospital (led by Ben Kingsley, riffing on a classic evil-doctor shtick complete with mind-numbing expository dumps) try to confound him.

Between Scorsese's impeccable sense of timing, the painterly cinematography of Robert Richardson, and Robbie Robertson's insanely florid score, things get very tense very quickly (a scene involving matches, a dark cell, and a disfigured Jackie Earle Haley is a skin-crawling delight). Daniels is plagued by flashbacks to his World War II experiences—he was one of the liberators of Dachau—and gorgeous, malevolent dream sequences, and he begins to uncover some terrifying truths about the institution.

Shutter Island's great failing, though, comes in the worst possible place: its climactic scene. Thick with exposition and more than a few cinematic clichés, the scene chokes and thuds and leaves the viewer wondering about the worthiness of the whole endeavor. That the film recovers from this spill with a brilliant coda only partway cleans up the awful mess. It's not a perfect horror film, but Scorsese is getting closer; maybe we'll finally get his masterpiece of terror in 2030. recommended