15 Mind-Bending Movies Like Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese doesn't typically trade too heavily within the space of the horror or psychological thriller genre, which is what makes "Shutter Island," his 2010 adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name, all the more notable (and perhaps why Scorsese was able to score one of his biggest box office hits). With Leonardo DiCaprio at the center, the film follows him as U.S. Marshal Edward "Teddy" Daniels, tasked with investigating the disappearance of a patient at a remote psychiatric hospital.

Suspicion and paranoia run rampant from there, as Teddy finds himself trapped within the dubious details of the case and the slipping sanity of his own mental state. "Shutter Island" focuses heavily on themes of false interpretations of identity and reality as brought on by a traumatic past, conveyed via a twisty, moody thriller with a striking sense of morose, rainy atmosphere and setting. Lehane's original material draws inspiration from iconic dramas of both literature and film, the likes of which have inspired countless other dark thrillers of a similar vein, giving "Shutter Island" numerous progenitors and contemporaries that share its DNA.

If you want more movies that deliver a similar vibe, here are 15 mind-bending movies like "Shutter Island."

"Vertigo" is not only Alfred Hitchcock's best movie — there's an argument that it is the greatest movie of all time. In this obsession-laced thriller starring Jimmy Stewart, Hitchcock echews conventional filmmaking tenets of easy plot progression or sympathetic heroes, instead delivering a strange, harrowing drama that constantly shifts the very nature of the protagonist's headspace and motives.

As Stewart's fixated and acrophobic detective Scottie Ferguson becomes closer and closer to the subject of his latest investigation — a friend's ethereal wife played by Kim Novak, seemingly engaged in something suspicious — Ferguson becomes ever more absorbed and controlling over a fantasy he's invented within his own psyche. It's a disorienting trajectory for any movie, but Hitchcock's film is one of the great psychological thrillers directly because it seems to play as an idiosyncratic transmission from some buried layer of consciousness. Coupled with the director's gorgeous sense of blocking and framing, and some of the most expressive use of Technicolor ever afforded to any movie, "Vertigo" is the kind of template more movies should aspire to, even knowing they'll likely never reach its mesmerizing heights.

If you want a movie with a dramatic crux that hinges directly on the main character's mental state, boy, have I got a movie for you. But you likely already know the famous conceit of blockbuster hit-maker Christopher Nolan's early Guy Pearce-starring thriller: that of a man in pursuit of his wife's murderer, whose big, unfortunate hang-up is his short-term amnesia, making it rather difficult to remember what strides he's made toward accomplishing his goal.

The very conceit of "Memento" encourages confusion, but therein lies the greatness of Nolan's radical neo-noir saga: Yhe elements that trip you up on an initial viewing come to reveal themselves upon reflection, and encourage a return to the film's seedy world. With standout performances from Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Joe Pantoliano, Nolan broke into cult fandom (before breaking into the true mainstream) with the type of neurotic thriller that befits a list of movies stemming from psychological obsession (which is maybe why this will not be the only Nolan movie you see on this list).

"A Cure For Wellness" is a two-pronged instance of a movie being evocative of "Shutter Island." Both films take place at remote medical centers that cause their main characters to experience a sense of mania and isolation, and both are also extremely focused on the effects of neurosis and the collapse of mental stability. With a gorgeous and eerie aesthetic of gothic and clinical dread, "A Cure For Wellness" is an underrated modern thriller from one of our perpetually discounted great directors, Gore Verbinski.

A return to horror following his famous J-horror remake "The Ring" — after spending a lot of time in the world of big-budget studio adventure movies with the likes of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, "Rango," and "The Lone Ranger" — Verbinski digs back into the genre with the aplomb redolent of the most evocative genre filmmakers. He crafts a queasy sense of tension out of his nauseating atmosphere, as well as from the unnerving performances from the likes of Dane DeHaan and an early role for Mia Goth. The world unduly rejected "A Cure For Wellness" back in 2016, which is maybe why his upcoming feature "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" will be his first movie in nearly a decade.

Another mental institution-set thriller, Steven Soderbergh's "Unsane" comes with all the accoutrements that you would expect from this particular flavor of thriller subgenre: psychoanalysis, themes of paranoia and obsession, and a questioning of identity and one's sense of self. Soderbergh captures all of that and more in this disquieting movie starring Claire Foy as a woman who is involuntarily committed to a mental asylum as she attempts to escape a stalker.

Soderbergh being Soderbergh, making a straight-laced genre movie could never be quite enough, so of course, he shot the entire thing on an iPhone 7 Plus. Your experience with the film will vary wildly on how much the visual aesthetic does or does not bother you, but I would personally defend it as a choice that makes the very fabric of the movie seem like it's false, which contributes to the themes of confused mental stability and the potential malicious intent behind Foy's central predicament. Fans of "Shutter Island" will likely find "Unsane" to be an underrated, experimental gem.

Leigh Whannell's version of the classic Universal Monster character trades in the original's prankish energy for something almost infuriatingly recognizable in how it depicts a man who goes to extreme ends to gaslight a woman to meet his own sadistic ends. "The Invisible Man" is a scary, timely horror update and a tense, nervy sci-fi thriller that feels achingly modern in its all-too-perceptible depiction of gender dynamics and of insecure, violent manhood.

Elisabeth Moss is the beleaguered protagonist at the center of events and Oliver Jackson-Cohen is her abusive boyfriend, who takes his conniving possessiveness to absurdly extreme destinations as he invents a technology to make himself invisible and terrorize the woman he refuses to let escape his grasp. As writer and director, Whannell locates a genuinely upsetting reality of insecure men who make it their life's mission to prove their sense of control, while making a successfully jumpy and inventive, socially-engaged techno-thriller to boot.

David Fincher's "The Game" feels like it gets forgotten within the larger context of his filmography — perhaps because its final reveal, for some, may feel like a bit of an underwhelming stunt that doesn't live up to the preceding two hours of psychological thrills. However, that discounts Fincher's firm grasp on character work and the way the twists and turns of lead Michael Douglas's sudden, winding, and seemingly dangerous excursion through the back alleys and seedy characters of San Francisco leave a lasting imprint on the isolated heart of his character.

More than anything else, "The Game" proved that Fincher, at this point still relatively early in his career, was a director capable of expert conceptions of pulp and lurid excitement, while still working as an artist seeking to subvert traditional notions of what a mystery like "The Game" would normally offer audiences. Its surprisingly reassuring perspective, in light of some of its more menacing qualities, may be partially why "The Game" still holds up nearly 30 years later.

Before he was the point man for Wolverine movies, dad-core motor sports dramas like "Ford v. Ferrari," and legacy franchise sequels like "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," James Mangold tried his hand at pulpy genre journeyman fluff rather than box-office smash and awards consideration artistic pedigree. "Identity" is the stuff of dime-store paperback silliness, but Mangold's strength behind the camera turns this slasher-cum-psycho-thriller into something of surprisingly engaging entertainment.

Following a group of ten strangers stranded at a hotel who find themselves the potential victims of a savage serial killer stalking the grounds, Mangold assembles a robust ensemble (including John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina, John Hawkes, and more) to deliver a lean, tightly-plotted shocker with an enjoyment level that will depend on how much you can tolerate the film's eventual absurdity. "Identity" has all the thrills you need in the span of 90 minutes — if you're willing to tolerate a plot device that lets the movie play by nonsensical rules for the sake of faking you out.

Oh, you like movies where Leonardo DiCaprio is tormented by the loss of his wife while troubled with the psychological suffering of his own mind? "Inception" has got your back. Christopher Nolan's intellectual blockbuster action-thriller about a highly specialized espionage agent who invades the subconscious of his targets through dreams with an expert team of operatives remains a high point within the filmmaker's filmography for how its elaborate conceptualization gives way to white-knuckle, thoughtful action filmmaking.

With "Inception," Nolan delivered one of the biggest box office hits ever and confirmed himself as the rare director to reach household name status. He delivers high-concept, almost abstract ideas through narrative construction that's somehow both accessibly commercial and intricately designed on both a practical and emotional level, and with remarkable clarity and tactile excitement within the set-piece design. Pulling off the uncommon feat by making an original concept so ingrained in the public consciousness that the very word "inception" became a shorthand for jokes for ideas layered onto one another, "Inception" has staked a claim as one of the great blockbusters of the 21st century.

Denis Villeneuve's first mainstream Hollywood feature was this tense, dark drama about the search for two missing young girls, and the desperate panic that sets in as both the families and a stoic detective engage in the widespread search. There's a part of me that misses when Villeneuve went away from crafting taut, complex thrillers such as this to become the elevated blockbuster guy, as he has a distinct eye for elevating material that could otherwise belong to a twadry Lifetime movie.

He does so with the help of Aaron Guzikowski's script, which has a perceptive hold on the afflictions of the characters at the center of this story. "Prisoners" ultimately tells the story of a vicious circle of victimization, wherein the lines between justice and vigilante forms of retribution exist on opposite sides of a thin line that's easy to find justification to cross. Led by two high-strung performances in Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, and with a perfectly disquieting use of Paul Dano, "Prisoners" is a pitch-perfect piece of suburban paranoia.

The second David Fincher film on this list, "Gone Girl" is notable for its undercurrent of pitch-black, uproariously dark sense of cutting humor lurking beneath the domestic pulp of its story. "Gone Girl" not only delivers us one of cinema's best villains in Rosamund Pike's Amy Dunne, but it subverts your expectations of where to cast blame throughout, as Fincher engages in a true-crime flavored saga about the dissolution of a marriage that constantly asks you to reflect on the moral entanglements of those at the center of the story, and of the viewer themselves as they reckon with their own morbid curiosity. 

In adapting Gillian Flynn's novel of the same name, Fincher gives the tale of domestic melodrama and double crossing his own distorted perspective, locating the sullen truth of hysteria and derangement lurking underneath the placid surface of peaceful suburbia, where two psychopaths, feigning some normalcy, may be exactly what the other needs, or perhaps deserves. 

If you're surprised to see a third Fincher picture on this list, don't worry — there will be two more! Turns out the guy known for making vivid, twisting psychological thrillers would show up a lot on a list of movies meant to encompass the genre. "Seven" is when Fincher broke into the mainstream following the largely misbegotten "Alien 3," earning commercial and critical acclaim for his Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman-starring, hugely dark neo-noir about the hunt for a serial killer who operates based on the code of the Seven Deadly Sins.

That "Seven" was as big a hit as it was seems like an unlikely sensation given how truly rancid Fincher and cinematographer Darius Khondji make the environment feel, matching the story's excessively bleak progression and conclusion. By making a movie that depicts the desolate heart of evil woven into the fabric of the world, Fincher creates a film that occasionally feels vile itself. "Seven" is when Fincher truly arrived, and the film's influence endures to this day.

Some would say "The Machinist" and "Shutter Island" are basically the same movie, and while that's ultimately a rather reductive comparison to make between two good films, watching them back-to-back does reveal extremely similar fascinations with the human psyche and how it causes us to externalize and personify our greatest traumas. Rather than a detective on a case, Christian Bale plays a factory worker who suffers from insomnia and guilt from an on-the-job accident, slowly losing his grip on his life as he shifts responsibility to a man in his life named Ivan (John Sharian).

The twist of "The Machinist" is obviously best left unspoiled, though fans of "Shutter Island" should enjoy what it reveals about the fragile emotional reality of the protagonist. Though, "The Machinist" is perhaps most famous for Christian Bale's punishing regimen he inflicted on himself to lose 60 pounds to play the emaciated Trevor Reznik, a grueling process that shades in Bale's agonized performance.

Anyone who has seen "Fight Club" can speak to pretty specific reasons as to how it resembles elements of "Shutter Island," but all the uninitiated need to know that it's another dark and frenzied David Fincher psychological drama that takes some turns you may not expect. Chuck Palahniuk is the perfect source material for Fincher to adapt and update with his own grimy flair, telling a story of late '90s capitalistic malaise that served as the true final word on the decade when it released toward the end of 1999. 

Though known for being frequently misinterpreted by a large subset of men infected with an undue sense of machismo, the poignancy of "Fight Club" stems from the fact that it is a warning, not a call to arms. Now that, more than ever, our domestic and international politics are governed by insecure, easily influenced men who will give up ethical worldview for the easy answers provided by a dangerous figurehead, "Fight Club" has never felt more prescient. 

We made it to the last David Fincher movie on the list! There's actually a world in which Fincher would have made a great version of "Shutter Island" — the movie feels somewhat indebted to some of his style anyway — but he has other detective movies for us to enjoy instead. That brings us to "Zodiac," which is about the obsessive hunt for the elusive Zodiac killer by a set of journalists and detectives, whose lives become spent away by the monomania of the search.

You'll hear many people say that "Zodiac" is Fincher at the peak of his powers, and that's because, well, yeah, it is. "Zodiac" is pitch-perfect — expertly shot, performed, edited, and with a skilled control of a tone that balances the bleak with the darkly humorous. "Zodiac" may have been a box office flop at the time, but the way it has stood the test of time should speak for itself.

We're going back to the impetus for the very type of psychological thriller "Shutter Island' posits itself as here. Going back to watch "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," you'll be shocked how much the developments resemble so many modern psychological thrillers, from "The Machinist" to "Fight Club." Director Robert Wiene's silent German Expressionist horror film is the blueprint for generations of dark, winding dramas — as well as more varied types of films, such as "The Nightmare Before Christmas — and is one of the most visually evocative films of all time.

Now 105 years old, you'll be astonished to find how much "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" truly does hold up to this day, thanks to its brilliantly moody atmosphere, gorgeous angular set design, stunning photography, and a truly unsettling tenor that ensures the film retains every stray ounce of its initial terror. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" is one of the most influential movies of all time, and you'll do well to expand your cinematic palette by having seen it.