Woe be to anyone who has to set a scene in an insane asylum.

By now we're all thoroughly immunized to the idea that the guy in the Napoleon hat makes so much sense maybe society is the crazy one. Besides, modern treatment is way boring. We don't have the skull-drills anymore. The dunking vats (which in typical government cheapness probably doubled as witch-testers). Electroshock has been revived, but that's turns out it's a good thing.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

Modern treatment seems limited to pills, pills and more pills, and that's hardly dramatic when a loony bin's pharmacological intake isn't any heavier than your average classroom of second graders. What's a writer to do? Set his story in the asylum's grimmer past, duh, like in the adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island.

Federal Marshal Leonardo DiCaprio and new partner, Mark Ruffalo, have been dispatched to Shutter Island, home of a treatment center for the criminally insane. One of the patients has gone missing, vanished from her cell without a trace.

But it's as if chief psychiatrist Ben Kingsley doesn't want her found. The staff are uncooperative or unavailable. The other patients have been coached. It isn't until an island-battering hurricane sets many of the inmates free that DiCaprio's able to clue in to an apparent government conspiracy to turn inmates into super soldiers.

Shutter Island is a tough one to talk about. I can't talk about the ending without giving it away, and if I did that and also existed in a hypothetical reality where I was ever recognized, I would have to wear a bag over my head to stop getting punched in the face by angry theatergoers. But pretty soon people would wise up and start punching the bag-headed guy instead, so really I'd have to invest in some sort of spiked football helmet. Point is, a lot of the movie can only be talked about within the context of that not-talkaboutable ending! What's a spoiler-averse guy supposed to do?

Well...talk about the rest of the flick, I guess. Which is awesome, from the gorgeous cinematography to DiCaprio's raw performance, which recaptures his simmering anger in The Departed while approaching it from the perspective of a man wracked by his own memories.

Those memories are shown in flashbacks and dreams, bright and graphic and surreal sequences of dying Nazis and the dead spilling from internment camps. Normally, I hate dream sequences — either they make no sense or their logic is forced and artificial. They're mostly a cheap trick to drum up suspense or atmosphere the movie doesn't deserve.

Director Martin Scorsese uses these dreams as more than tricks. They definitely build atmosphere — it's soon so thick you'd think you could flap your arms and lift right off the ground — but his dreams build to that big ending, too, slipping vital pills of back story into the juicy visual steak of burning wives and flopping Nazi commanders. If Scorsese directed my dreams, I'd eat nothing but Ambien and NyQuil. And key lime pie because that shit is delicious.

In the hands of just about anyone else, Shutter Island would have been a mess. Between the dreams, DiCaprio's interviews with crazy people and a convoluted conspiracy, it should have coagulated into one thick stew of "who the hell cares."

Then you've got an ending that's nearly impossible to get right. Masterfully as Scorsese sets the table for his loopy conclusion, it's still going to leave a lot of people feeling confused and cheated. I wanted it to turn out differently, too.

Too bad for me. What I got instead was cohesive, driving and disturbing — a film I wanted to see again the moment it faded to black.

Grade: A