In 1954, U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) travel by ferry to Ashecliffe Hospital on the remote Shutter Island, a maximum-security psychiatric facility for the criminally insane, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of patient Rachel Solando — a woman who seemingly vanished from a locked room without a trace. As a massive hurricane traps the marshals on the island, Teddy is increasingly haunted by nightmares involving his late wife Dolores and vivid flashbacks to his liberation of the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. The more Teddy probes the facility's secretive staff and its enigmatic lead psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the more he becomes convinced the institution is conducting horrific government-sanctioned experiments on patients. The film's shocking climax reveals that Teddy Daniels is in fact Andrew Laeddis, a patient at Ashecliffe himself, who drowned his own children and murdered his wife after her mental illness was left untreated — and that the entire investigation was an elaborate role-play orchestrated by Cawley to break through his delusion. The devastating final line — "Which would be worse: to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?" — suggests that Laeddis may have chosen lobotomy over accepting the truth of what he has done.