The DiCaprio/Scorcese combination is back to work.

After crafting more than a few masterpieces throughout his forty-year career, Martin Scorsese was due to let loose and have some fun. In his latest offering, Shutter Island, he does exactly that.

Scorsese practically revels in the conventions of the psychological horror genre, saturating the film in a lurid, nightmarish atmosphere so thick and pulpy it borders on heavy-handedness. And yet he somehow makes it all work.

The film functions as both a signature Scorsese film and a blatant homage to the psychological mastery of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick,among others, and while it ultimately falls short of a place among classics, Shutter Island is a haunting thriller that succeeds more often than it fails.

Adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from Dennis Lehane’s book, the film takes place circa 1954, on an island off the Boston Harbor that houses a mental institute for the criminally insane. Recycling his for-better-or-worse Bostonian accent from Scorsese’s The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshall summoned to Shutter Island to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a female patient. As Daniels and his partner (Mark Ruffalo) begin to probe the staff and patients of the experimental facility, it quickly becomes evident that the circumstances involving the woman’s disappearance do not add up, and the pot begins to boil.  The atmosphere of ominous dread that Scorsese carefully constructs from the opening shot builds steadily throughout the film, with most of the heavy lifting done by a ferocious storm that engulfs the island, an overbearing Hitchcockian score, and the unrelenting furrowing of DiCaprio’s brow.

At the heart of most Scorsese movies is a man battling guilt, emotional trauma, and the overwhelming desire for retribution, and DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels is no exception. As he steps foot on the island he begins to suffer migraines, flashbacks to WWII and his involvement in liberatingDachau, and nightmares of his wife’s death in an apartment fire. As the movie goes on, the flashbacks and nightmares begin to morph into full-on hallucinations, and Scorsese shoots these in Technicolor-drenched intensity—stunning visual sequences that smear the line between Teddy’s past and reality.

This is the movie’s most gripping landscape: Teddy’s mind. The island itself, with its menacing cliffs and eerily manufactured calm, is less ambiguous in its sinister nature—it is clear that something is not right. The convoluted plot of the movie mirrors Teddy’s uneven mental state: between suggestions of conspiracy, the Third Reich, even the Cold War, there are more red herrings and MacGuffins than we can count. But we are forced to muddle through this labyrinth of paranoia along with Teddy, and this produces a constant state of uncertainty—Is Teddy going mad?

Can we trust him? Do we have a choice?

I am sure that many people will discount the film as having a “twist” too easy to figure out, but this doesn’t really matter at all—Scorsese gives you everything you need to guess the twist, yet still manages to make an emotionally devastating ending that is somehow exactly what you expected. The predictability of the ending is beside the point, it’s how Scorsese gets you there that is the real fun. And he gets a lot of help—the cast is terrific. DiCaprio gives his best performance in years, completely embodying the obsessive psychosis of a damaged man. Every piece of the supporting cast (Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Mark Ruffalo) is spot-on. The always-amazing Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley each get only one scene, but they absolutely electrify with the little screen time they are given.

Shutter Island is not without its flaws: it is overlong (as most Scorsese movies are) at 138 minutes, and it has a cumbersome middle act that tries too hard to set up the finale. But Scorsese is a director who has a breathtaking knowledge of how sound and image work together in cinema, and here he uses that knowledge to great effect—this might be Scorsese’s most visually striking movie to date. Shutter Island is a viscerally suspenseful film, the evidence of a master at work. While it may not live up to the classics of the genre, or even to his own best, Scorsese’s latest is still far above your average popcorn entertainment.

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Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock:
Shutter Island contains more than a few nods to this 1958 classic, a noir-ish psychological thriller that might just be Hitchcock’s greatest. Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak star in an epic story of love and obsession. Bernard Herrmann’s music, one of the best film scores ever composed, is worth a viewing alone.

Shock Corridor, Sam Fuller:
This bold and pulp-y noir was perhaps ahead of its time, taking on such issues as incest, racism and cold war paranoia in the early 60s. Fuller’s highly stylized cult classic follows a journalist as he gets himself thrown into an insane asylum in order to expose a murder. Not for everyone’s tastes, as it is unapologetically disturbing and politicized, but Shock Corridor is a thought-provoking and still relevant film today that deserves its place among film noir’s best.