This thriller offers a heady mix of mental illness, war crimes, incarceration, grief, loss of identity and disgusting weather. In other words, a lot which is awful about being human. It is a movie which impresses by sheer style and the conviction of its story-telling.

It is 1954. Terry Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a US Marshall who arrives with his sidekick Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) on a windswept prison fortress island in Massachusetts Bay which houses the country’s most secure mental institution. They are there to look for Rachel Solando, a murderess who has vanished from her cell. Their attempts at detective work are seemingly thwarted by the institution’s hierarchy (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow), and they are stranded by the increasingly ferocious weather. But Teddy has his own problems, chiefly the death of his wife two years earlier and his memories of being at the liberation of the Dachau death camp. The plot springs one surprise after another to great unsettling effect, and finally arrives at a state where no-one is quite what they seem and all our assumptions have been undercut. As one key character explains, once you have been designated insane, all protestations to the contrary merely reinforce the diagnosis.

Scorsese, the great stylist, handles this material by revisiting movie genres of the past, notably noir films of the forties and Hitchcock thrillers, and pulls it all together to make a film which as much comments on his love of cinema as tells a story. The performances and dialogue are all that little bit heightened, production design well over the top, and shot selection and camera movement immensely purposeful. The music track assembled by Robbie Robertson uses excerpts from some of the twentieth century’s great avant-garde masters.

Not to everybody’s taste, therefore, and some will always prefer Scorsese in his comfort zone of contemporary gangland. However this somewhat curious addition to his oeuvre resonates long in the mind.