What is the architecture of insanity?  Bentham’s panopticon, Maclean Hospital, Escher?  The architecture in the film “Shutter Island,” which combines elements of all three, offers up a convincing one.  The movie, which takes place at a prison for the mentally ill, was filmed at various locations in Massachusetts including Medfield State Hospital, and with sets and models designed by Dante Ferretti.

“Shutter Island” has the same emotional queasiness of other who-am-I movies, like “Vertigo,” “Inception” and “Angelheart."  But the indelible physicality of "Shutter Island” (the hyper-real color, the overbaked special effects, the gothic lighting) make the movie’s sense of place far more compelling than any of its characters and any of their dilemmas.  The scenes set in the hospital’s ward for dangerous patients, with crisscrossing steel staircases and endless masonry tunnels, were particularly unsettling.  These are strong, lucid spaces from which there is no relief, that is, no opening to the outside.