Shutter Island is essentially about Andrew falling into a delusion that he is a better man who didn't kill his wife and that his time on the earth has meaning because he's looking for a way to avenge her rather than live with the guilt of having killed her. Andrew asking Sheehan that question reframes his actions.
In that respect, Shutter Island is a complex study of grief and trauma, and the lengths the human mind will go to in order to medicate itself from harsh reality. Guilt and hurt are what cause Andrew to invent a secondary persona — one in which he is still a war hero and a federal Marshal named Teddy Daniels.
In 1954, U.S. Marshal Edward "Teddy" Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule travel to Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island, Boston Harbor, to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, a patient of the hospital who had previously drowned her three children.
Shutter Island forces its characters — and viewers — to question what is real and what is imagined, but even more importantly, it raises the question of what it truly means to be insane. Is it a mental imbalance? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
It is complicated and has several possible avenues of plot (and you can't tell what is really going on with all those avenues presented) but that is what makes it a mystery. Once you get to the end you understand what happened and confusion floats away.
SHUTTER ISLAND Breakdown | Ending Explained, Easter Eggs, Hidden Details & Things You Missed
Is there a mistake in Shutter Island?
Revealing mistakes
Obvious green screen images when Teddy and Warden are in a jeep coming back from the hidden cave. Obvious green screen images when on the ferry boat and when entering the island on a jeep passing in front of several buildings.
Only Teddy is not a real person but a delusion created by inmate Andrew Laeddis. The ending of “Shutter Island” reveals that DiCaprio's character is a patient himself, committed to the Shutter Island facility after murdering his wife (Michelle Williams) because she went insane and killed their children.
Was Andrew faking it at the end of Shutter Island?
In the end of "Shutter Island," it's revealed that the main character, Teddy Daniels, is actually Andrew Laeddis, a patient at the mental institution. He has been experiencing delusions and hallucinations, which were orchestrated by the staff to help him come to terms with the truth of his past.
Teddy wakes up in the hospital under the watch of Cawley, Sheehan, and the nurse who played Rachel Solando. Teddy tells them the truth they told him in a coherent manner, but they are terrified he will soon regress. And it is revealed they've done this to him before.
Some believe that the Rachel Solando in the cave was real; others believe that she was a figment of Teddy's imagination. It is possible that he fabricated the Rachel Solando in the cave, because what she says was everything he wanted to hear, which gives him a reason to find everyone suspicious on Shutter Island.
Shutter Island is a film that shows so many evidences of hallucination experienced by the main character, Teddy Daniels. Teddy Daniels had bad experiences in the past which lead him to change his identity in order to forget his past.
So, finding the cave, was in itself a manifestation of Teddy's own mind using "survival instincts" and the rats were most possibly, remnants of his past life during his days at the German Camp, where he may or may not have been a part of and witnessed mass shooting and the pile of the corpses laid alongside the path.
He explains that Andrew Laeddis is an anagram of Edward Daniels and that he murdered his wife, Dolores Chanal (an anagram of Rachel Solando), two years before after she drowned their three children during a manic episode. This is the answer of the code "the law of 4" and Laeddis is the 67th patient at Ashecliffe.
To keep quiet for the sake of all those he could still save if the results of the roleplay are a success. "Shhh. Keep quiet. You can't run from what you've done, but that's okay."
Why does Leonardo DiCaprio have a bandaid in Shutter Island?
It is unclear why he wears the band-aid, but it stays with him until nearly the end of the film. He only gets rid of it while taking a shower after John Cawley informs him that he actually showed up on the island alone.
However, in a radical twist, we find that Teddy is himself a patient at the asylum. He suffers from Delusional Disorder, creating a false world to escape the dark reality of his past. Shutter Island is one of the many films that present the ethical considerations of psychological treatment to a mainstream audience.
Andrew's last line of dialogue, and his failure to respond to being called Teddy, has led many fans to speculate that Andrew had not actually regressed, and was voluntarily submitting himself to a lobotomy so he did not have to live with his sins and the monster he had become.
There is no Rachel Solando. There is no Chuck, at least as we see him. It's all a trick on the person we know as Teddy for the entirety of the story, right up until the end. Teddy, not the arsonist of his fantasy, was the one who killed his wife after she had drowned their three children.
Inspired by the history of the Boston Harbor Islands, Bostonian Dennis Lehane published his book Shutter Island in 2003. In this thriller, Lehane created a fictitious hospital island with nefarious happenings.
In the story told that Andrew is a veteran U.S marshal in World War II who became getting a mental disorder because he has some traumatic events after the war in Dachau. There were some main events those to be traumatic and brought him to indicated his schizophrenia symptoms and became delusional acute.
He finds out that he was never Teddy, the US Marshal, but Andrew Laeddis, who murdered his own wife after she drowned their three children. His partner Chuck, played by Mark Ruffalo, turns out to be a doctor who was watching over him and is actually named Lester Sheehan.
When Teddy dreams about Laeddis, Laeddis sits beside the fire in an armchair. Teddy's version of Laeddis; a scarred and disfigured man, then lights a match and proceeds to light Teddy's cigarette. This act of Teddy accepting the light from Laeddis is symbolic of Teddy accepting this fantasy as reality.
What did George tell Teddy while they were in Ward C?
Teddy & Chuck get into building C. Teddy finds George Noyce, He tells Teddy that the only way he can save Noyce is to forget his wife and Laeddis. Noyce tells him that Laeddis is no longer in C building, but that they have taken him to the lighthouse, where they are planning to do a lobotomy on him.
