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Spoilers
Shutter Island is about a mental patient having an episode in a asylum he’s in. Or it’s about about a man being driven to insanity in said institution, depending on how you interpret the movie.
However, I find it possible that it’s not a thing of personal interpretation, but that the true answer lies in the last shot of the movie, showing the lighthouse where doctors are presumably performing horrible experiments. Teddy is taken there for his supposed lobotomy, but the last shot only shows the lighthouse from outside, underlined by ominous music.
For me, this means that the doctors were lying all along and Teddy is, in fact, not crazy. What do you think?
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“Teddy” is in fact not crazy, that’s the real huge twist, not the one where everyone else in the complex was in on it as some bizarre role-playing thing (that is a twist too, at least narratively, but not the actual whopper).
The real twist at the end is that Teddy is in fact fully sane, knows he’s fully sane, has some very dark regrets that he can’t live with, and knowingly and consciously undergoes the lobotomy so that he basically turns into a potato who can’t remember what he’s done.
In his mind, or what’s about to be left of it, he “dies as a good man,” rather than having to “live as a monster.”
Yeah, that’s it, the eccentric treatment of everyone playing along actually works and he’s forced to acknowledge his past to himself, but pretends to still be in denial to the doctors so he can basically die and end the suffering.
Its a hell of a lot of combined effort for an assisted suicide more or less
What made him a monster ?
I think because at this point - we (the viewer) are now aware of what is happening, and are no longer viewing the story from Teddy's perspective.