Scorsese teams with DiCaprio again in this  asylum mystery. Not everything is what it seems (shock!) and it doesn’t take long for hallucinations to start (double shock!).

Face it, the asylum mystery has been done to death.  Same old same old, right?  Wrong.  Well, a little right and wrong.  It’s hard to go all wrong with brilliant acting (DiCaprio will get an Oscar nod for this, and may win), brilliant dialogue, multi-layered yet seamless plot lines, and phenomenal cinematography.

Some of it gets a little heavy handed sometimes, I’ll admit.  Parts of the soundtrack were flashbacks to Kubrick and the main scene with the warden seemed a little off kilter, but all in all it was a brilliant film.  Make that brilliant and deeply disturbing.  Bad stuff has gone down that comes back to like in the flashbacks.  There was a mother with a ten-year-old kid there; she should be flogged for it.  I’ll have that kid in class one day and he will be too warped to learn math because he has too much Scor-psycho in his head.  But I digress…

This film is not for the faint of heart.  It’s one of those films you watch and say “that was brilliant,” then never watch it again because you just don’t want to go back down that dark road.  Every horror writer should watch it.  Suspense writers, too.  It’s dark; it’s disturbing; it’s excellent.

Now I’m going to bed with the nightlight on.