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Quotes

Dr. John Cawley: We don't know how she got out of her room. It's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls.

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Mistakes

In the scene with the dying German officer lying on the floor, his gun is lying by his left hand - the same side as the big EXIT wound in his head. The gun should be by his right hand. See more...

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During the ferry approach at the start, we are shown Shutter Island. In actuality this is a combination of Peddocks Island (the decaying brick buildings), Maine's Acadia National Park, Massachusetts' Medfield State Hospital, and Turner Hill Country Club's Rice Estate (located in Ipswich, MA), which were combined via CGI. Additionally, the mountainous region of the island (shown as the ferry approaches) was also CGI, and added in post-production. See more...

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Movie Mistakes blog

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Shutter Island (2010) - 18 corrections

starring Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Ted Levine (add more)

Genres: Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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When Teddy's wife walks over to the window and looks out onto the lake and the sunset, she is talking to Teddy. The shot switches to see her face where she is still talking. Then the shot switches back to Teddy's point of view and we see her turning around. The audio still has her talking, but her mouth isn't moving as she turns. [Pretty much every interaction he has with his wife has been in his troubled psyche. There is no logic or reality involved when the actions are created in the mind of a mentally ill person. Its entirely possible that he was able to "hear" her thoughts. Although I agree that the mistake was unintentional on the part of the filmmakers, since its not "real" it can't truly be counted as a mistake.]
Edit Corrected by Kimberly Mason
Quote from Dr.: "Sanity's not a choice, Marshall. You can't just choose to get over it." [Movie quotes are not trivia.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
Toward the end of the movie, when Teddy is going to the lighthouse to rescue his partner, he is seen jumping over a wall. He lands in a large amount of fallen leaves. As he does so, the edge of the mat that breaks his fall is visible beneath them. [Everything teddy does is set up so would make sense that they would take care to protect him as much as possible, the mistake may in fact be part of the setup, not a filming error, teddy wouldn't have known what he landed on.]
Edit
In the flashback of Teddy where he is staring at the dying German officer who tried to commit suicide, the camera shows (from the gun's perspective) as the officer reaches for the gun. On his hand he wears a wedding band, but in Germany the wedding band is worn on the right hand. [Who said it was a wedding band? It could have been just a ring he wore.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
When Leo is talking about the massive killing at the concentration camp of the German soldiers, we see the camera run along as the US soldiers shoot them. At the end of the line, one of the German soldiers can be seen smiling for a brief moment after he falls down. [It's a grimace, not a smile.]
Edit Corrected by MovieFan612
When Teddy is dreaming that he is in the office and he sees Rachel and some dead kids, the smoke from the cigarette goes backwards. [This is done intentionally, he's in a dream. It would be impossible to make smoke go backwards without visual effects work.]
Edit Time
After Chuck gives Teddy a cigarette at the beginning of the movie, Teddy's left hand is holding the railing and has no wedding band on his ring finger. The ring is present in all other shots. [The scene on the boat never happened. It was a figment of Teddy's imagination. You'll notice he doesn't have the wedding band before Chuck asks about his wife, but after he explains his wife died in a fire he does. So Teddy is reminding himself that he had a wife in his subconscious.]
Edit
When Teddy is interviewing the lady patient, she picks up the cup and it has nothing in it, but when she puts the cup down it has water in it. [If you watch the scene again you will see that Chuck hands her a glass of water. When she goes to take a drink her hand is empty "no glass at all". She then sits a empty glass down. The next scene shows the glass sitting on the table half full (half empty for the PC people).]
Edit
Edward has several flashbacks to being one of the soldiers who liberated Dachau. Many of these show piles of bodies encased in ice and heavy falling snow. Dachau was liberated on April 29th, 1945. Snow would have been a possibility, but photos taken at the time show no ice or snow and certainly no heaps of ice-covered bodies. [By all historical accounts, the pre-dawn liberation of Dachau took place during a late spring snowstorm, and additional troops arriving in the morning also reported a fresh blanket of snow, so the depiction of snow at Dachau is not a mistake.]
Edit Corrected by MovieFan612
When Edward meets with Rachel in the cave, she talks about "Sodium Amytal, an opium-derived sedative". Sodium Amytal is a barbiturate which has no chemical relation to opium. [Because Dr. Rachel is a figment of Teddy's psychosis, this isn't really a mistake, as it just means that Teddy's doesn't have the most up-to-date info on the newest drugs.]
Edit Corrected by MovieFan612
When Teddy starts to chase the crazy guy in the C Building, he hits a wall and yells to the crazy guy "hey, heeeeyyyy!" and immediately after this the shot is repeated, Teddy hits the same wall again and yells again. [I've watched this a few times, both in context and out of context. It's not a mistake; it's one of the many techniques used to create atmosphere in this movie, just like the intentional continuity and missing cup errors in the interview scene earlier.]
Edit Corrected by Nik Rolls Time
When Teddy was administering CPR to his daughter in the lake, he used a method that was not in common use yet. The scene is set in 1952, but the rescue breathing method he used was only experimented with in 1952. [If the technique did exist (even if it was only experimental), there is a chance Teddy could have heard of it and/or seen it demonstrated.]
Edit Corrected by Twotall
In the lighthouse scene, the critical prop for the pivotal moment was an item that did not exist in 1954: a whiteboard. [This isn't a whiteboard, it is a flipchart of sorts, with white paper on it. If you look along the top there are hooks holding the paper in place.]
Edit
Before they go to Ward C, it says all the power has been cut, so how were there lights flickering in Ward C? Also with the power cut, only some prisoners were out of the cells, not all. [The lights are flickering because the work crews are trying to get the power back on. The guard they meet when they go into ward C specifically states they've rounded up most of the prisoners but not all. We can assume the ones they've recaptured have been put back into their cells and the doors manually secured.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
When Andrew Laeddis is shown he has surgical staples across his face. Surgical staples were not used until 1960. [Surgical stapling was introduced in the early 1900s. It was pioneered by Humer Hultl, who introduced a prototype surgical stapler in 1908.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
I think the the narrator tells us that Shutter Island is located in Boston Harbor and also that it is eleven miles off the coast! A harbor 11 miles off the coast? please. [Boston Harbor is divided into an inner harbor and outer harbor, which extends several miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. Islands far off the Boston Coast are considered to be in the outer harbor area.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie
During the interrogation scene, a patient asks for a glass of water. When she receives a the glass of water, she lifts her hand to her mouth and makes a drinking motion, but is not holding a glass. A moment later she sets down an empty glass that previously she was not holding. When the camera angle changes, the glass has become half full. [The glass that disappears from the woman's hand while she is drinking from it is far too obvious to be a mistake by the filmmakers; it is one of several subtle hints throughout the film used to show that the scenes are not real, they are Teddy's delusions. The error is deliberate.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie
In the flashback, when Teddy was among the soldiers liberating Dachau, there is a sign above the gate that says "Arbeit Macht Frei". There was no such sign present at Dachau. [Excuse me, but there actually was just such a sign at the Dachau Concentration Camp. As a matter of fact, the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" were placed at the entrances to a quite a few other Nazi concentration camps, the most well known being Auschwitz (the Concentration and Extermination Camp(s).]
Edit Corrected by lmao