Two US Marshals arrive at a remote island sanatorium to investigate the disappearance of one of it’s patients. “Teddy” (Leonardo Di Caprio) is a confident, bullish man who has only recently returned from combat duty in Germany at the end of the war, whilst his partner “Chuck” (Mark Ruffalo) is a long-term beat cop. The place has it’s own fairly heft security arrangements and neither “Dr. Cawley” (Sir Ben Kingsley) nor his enigmatic consulting physician “Dr. Naehring” (Max Von Sydow) have much time for his heavy-handed demands. Quite swiftly, their work begins to unveil some sinister undercurrents at the asylum, where it’s 66 (or is it 67?) inmates might just be the victims of some left over work from the Nazis? "Teddy” starts to have flashbacks of his life with his wife (Michelle Williams) and their children and as the plot thickens both he, and the audience, begin to struggle with just what and what isn’t reality. Then an hurricane hits the island and from the devastation it soon emerges that virtually nothing at “Ashecliffe Hospital” is as we first thought. What starts out as a routine cop drama really does dig quite deeply into aspects of the human psyche as this progresses, and though Di Caprio is on solid form, it is Sir Ben who really delivers here with an accomplished display of menace hidden behind a bow tie and a meticulous command of both the language of the psychiatrist and of a character who might just have an ulterior motive. Von Sydow usually just has to show up to inject a degree of complexity to a plot, and he does that well enough - if a little too sparingly for my liking, and Ruffalo works with as a foil for his partner whose grasp seems to be slipping. Though hardly filmed in a dungeon environment, there is still a claustrophobic darkness to the hospital in which they live, work and explore and as the threads all start to knit together, we are never quite sure just which way up the toast is going to land. It explores the trauma of post wartime stress, the etymology of trauma, grief, despair and all whilst leading us on a merry psychological dance for a couple of hours. What's in the lighthouse and might they ever make to that ferry?