Similar Film - Shutter Island

A film comparable to ours is Shutter Island. In this film, The main character Teddy is seen to be a  detective on the search for a man who burned down his house with his family inside. The whole film revolves around Teddy's search for this man, however as the film the film goes on you start to realize something is wrong, and at the end there is a twist which reveals that Teddy is insane, and he was the one who killed his wife after he found she murdered his children. Teddy couldn't deal with this and he went insane, and made up an alternate chain of events in his head because he simply couldn't deal with the reality of what happened.


Our film is very similar in that Damian is on a search, however in our film the search is for his wife who he believes is lost and he must go out and find her. As the film goes on there are flashbacks of Damian and his wife embracing and spending time together. As the film goes on the flashbacks become darker until we eventually find out Damian is insane and he killed his wife, and is in fact inside a mental institution.


These two films are comparable in that they both contain flashback shots, and they both leave clues insinuating that the main character is mentally ill. Our main character is based on Teddy from Shutter Island, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and I wanted him to have similar features to Teddy. Damian is driven like Teddy is and he will stop at nothing to find his wife. He is also completely oblivious to the fact that he's insane.

Like Shutter Island, the lighting in our film will be very dark, until it comes to light that Damian is insane. In Shutter Island, Once Teddy realizes that he's insane, the lighting changes from dark doom and gloom to a nice sunny day while he's sat in the garden. Our film will use a similar theme in that when Damian is confronted, it will be in a well lit room symbolizing that he has nowhere left to hide from his insanity.

The music in our film will be similar to Shutter Island's as well. Our music will build tension and suspense as the film leads up to Damian finding his wife, however the music in Shutter Island is very classical and our film will differ from this.

Our film differs From Shutter Island in that our storyline is simpler. I wanted to keep the storyline as simple as possible because our film is a short film which would lead to poor character development if the storyline was too complicated, however we took Shutter Island's ideas of masked mental illness and applied them in our own way to make our film.

Here is a video of the scene in Shutter Island where Teddy realizes where he is and the reality of what happened to him.