Fear Island is a 2010 film directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and accompanied by highlights from Ben Kingsley and Mark Ruffalo. The film traces the noir cinema of the 40s and 50s, keeps the suspense to the end and immerses us in a totally disturbing situation. Situation.
An island, a psychiatric institution and an unexplained disappearance will be the main ingredients of this psychological thriller that has impressed everyone. The film takes us to 1954, when transorbitary lobotomy was still practiced.
- Federal agents Teddy Daniels and Chuk Aule will be sent to Ashecliffe Hospital to investigate a strange disappearance Can anyone disappear from a fully guarded institution.
- On an island.
- Without shoes and in the rain?The film plantes a plot that gradually deforms until it leads to a very disturbing result.
Throughout history, the treatment of mental illness has been very diverse. Michel Foucault addresses this topic in his book The Story of Madness in the Classical Age. Well, at any time it can stop being for someone else, or it can take on a different course and nuances; With madness something similar happens, not that Foucault defends madness, but tries to explain the change that occurs over time.
In the Middle Ages, he, were they excluded, but not locked up, because they assumed they had access to other types of knowledge. It was only in the Renaissance, with the emergence of rationalism, that they began to cloister and isolate themselves. Also appears the illogical, the madness.
In the modern era, madness begins to arouse a certain interest and fascination among researchers, from that moment on begins the search for a cure, although it is true that early practices can now be considered a scandal. we discovered mental disorders or illnesses that we had never heard of, and similarly, some beliefs were debuted. Remember that, until recently, homosexuality was considered a disease.
We know one of the most horrible psychiatric institutions, Ashecliffe, a hospital located on an island, where no one can escape, totally claustrophobic and isolated (worth redundancy), definitely a hostile place, the music also does not follow what the viewer hopes to be pleasant, but on the contrary, it creates a dark, gloomy and tense atmosphere.
The movie also shows us the? Psychiatric war that was experienced at the time, because it is a moment of change, of transition, where new currents collide with old ones, the old model of psychiatry required patient isolation and practices such as electric shock and lobotomy. , a new tendency has emerged to humanize or normalize the lives of patients, without resorting to containment and medication. The problem is that many drugs were not yet fully developed and were in the experimental phase.
Dr. Cawley is the director of the institution. He shows up as a man who tries to reconcile the two currents, because at no point does he want his patients treated as criminals, he stops for drug use and wants patients to be able to lead a “normal” life. contrasts with the fact that he runs an institution completely isolated from the world, where patients are imprisoned and lobotomies are still practiced in very extreme cases.
Fear Island patients are not ordinary patients, they are people who have committed atrocities: did they kill, were they injured?, and instead of being imprisoned, were assigned to this institution, where there were several wards because of the danger of the patients.
It’s impossible to talk without spoilers, because it’s a film with many argumentative twists that give clues about the result, so if you haven’t seen the movie, I don’t recommend you keep reading.
Although at first everything seems to point to a police investigative film, Scorsese leaves us some clues that indicate that not everything is what it looks like in Ilha do Fear, small details like the fact that Chuck couldn’t get the gun out with the agility he has. that he should have a cop, or that Teddy started hallucinating, dreaming about his dead wife, cawley’s medication for migraines, etc. All this leads us to think that something strange is happening to the protagonist.
Throughout history, we see that Teddy Daniels is starting to have migraines and memories of his past during World War II, he had some really traumatic experiences that left him a deep wound on his mind. The images of the Dachau concentration camp are very difficult to forget. and have consequences for their present. After returning from the war, Daniels shared his life with his wife Dolores and three children, but was a very dedicated man at work and spent little time with his family. In addition, their way of making ghosts from the past were not the safest, as they had serious problems with drinking.
Daniels begins to relive past experiences through dreams and hallucinations, so it is understood that he probably suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the difficult experiences he has had to face. As the film progresses, we see that the Second World War was not the only one that opened a wound to the protagonist; his family history also hides some secrets.
His wife said something in his head was talking to him, a kind of worm that was in her. Daniels was so focused on his work and his own traumas that he ignored his wife’s mental illness and, as a result, his health deteriorated and she ended up murdering her own children. Daniels, upon discovering such atrocity, kills his wife in tears.
All of this increases stress and Daniels appears in a state of denial and double personality, creating characters invented from anagrams, such as Andrew Laedis (who is Daniels himself) and Rachel Solando (his wife). In this way, he invents a fantasy in which his wife died in a tragic fire caused by an alleged Laedis and, in his fantasy, he remains a federal agent and has been sent to the island to investigate a mysterious disappearance.
The protagonist creates a new reality and thus forgets what happened before, refuses to accept and prefers to live by lies, reflect and investigate the alleged conspiracies and experiments that have taken place on the island.
Dr. Cawley and his team let him pursue his fantasy in the hope that, finally, after discovering that there was no conspiracy, he will become aware of his past, accept it and find a cure.
Without a doubt, it is an interesting film that addresses topics related to the history of psychiatry and psychology and that, masterfully, plays with our minds and deceives our own senses, nothing is what it seems on Fear Island.
Do you live like a monster or die like a good man?Fear Island?