John Cage himself contributes 'Music for Marcel Duchamp' - already a movie score for a film by the famous Dada artist - and 'Roots of an Unfocus.' Those creepy sped-up and spliced-together noises that underscore Teddy's first Dachau flashback come from Nam June Paik's tape experiment 'Homage to John Cage' - a clever period-appropriate equivalent to the digitally distorted noises other horror filmmakers like to use. 'Shutter Island' opens with 'Fog Tropes,' an Ingram Marshall composition combining classical music with field recordings of foghorns, wind, and other environmental noise. After a successful career that saw the group tour with Bob Dylan and record classics like 'Forever Young' and 'The Weight,' Robertson brought in Scorsese to document the Band's final concert in 'The Last Waltz.' That was the end of the Band but the beginning of another long-lasting relationship, and Scorsese and Robertson have continued collaborating ever since. Mixing the two together is Robbie Robertson, former frontman of the Band. It comes from classical composer Max Richter's 'On the Nature of Daylight,' part of his 2004 suite 'The Blue Notebooks.' His other work ranges from the eight-hour 'Sleep,' performed in venues full of beds, to original movie to TV scores, including 'Waltz with Bashir' and 'Black Mirror.' The instrumental comes from a wildly different source. The vocals are from Dinah Washington's 1960 single 'This Bitter Earth.' Washington was in her prime when she cut that track, but she'd already been performing for almost 20 years in a career that encompassed soul, blues, jazz, pop, and gospel, including the smash hit 'What a Diff'rence a Day Makes.' Just look at what's going on in that scene with Noyce's disappearing hand - he's telling Teddy he's fallen for a fiction, just the way we have in the audience.

But in a movie where reality's up in the air as 'Shutter Island,' that's exactly what we need to remember. Most movies avoid continuity errors because they remind us what we see isn't real. And from that perspective, it's clear all these mistakes serve a purpose. 'Shutter Island' is edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, who's worked with Scorsese his entire career and won three Oscars - not the kind of person you'd expect to make mistakes. Plus, there's a cigarette that lights itself between cuts. And when Teddy interrogates a prisoner named George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley), George has his hand on his head when we see him head-on, but it disappears when we see him from behind. Cawley (Kingsley), his glass of soda teleports from his hand to the table between shots.

But if you're watching 'Shutter Island' closely, you'll see it breaks those rules.

Shutter island book cover