Andrew Laeddis (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a patient at Shutter Island. He can’t deal with the traumatic reality in his life (death of his children and wife), so he creates an imaginary world, in which he is a federal Marshal Teddy Daniels.

When you see the movie for the first time, you are led to believe, that Teddy Daniels is a real person, only to find out later, that he is actually the missing patient 67. But if you watch the movie again, you’ll notice, that there are clues throughout the whole movie, that the world of Teddy Daniels is imaginary. Let’s take a look at one example.

When Teddy interviews Mrs. Kearns, she pretends to drink from a glass of water.

In the next shot, she puts down the glass of water, but now its a real glass. Notice, that in the previous shot, the glass was in her right hand, while in this shot, the glass is in her left hand.

After a while, she leaves. Now, if you look closely, you’ll see that there is a water in the glass, which wasn’t there before. (I highly doubt, that this was an editing mistake.)

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I’m going to write more about visual storytelling in Shutter Island and extend this article as soon as possible! To stay updated about future write ups (to other articles as well),  you can follow the blog on Facebook.