The Departed (2006) review

The Departed is built on a mirror: two men in the same building, each pretending to be something they are not, each looking for the other. Scorsese keeps the two storylines in parallel and lets the audience feel the walls closing in from both directions.

The Mirror Structure

Billy Costigan is a state trooper sent undercover into Frank Costello's organisation. Colin Sullivan is a Costello protégé planted inside the State Police. Both are promoted, both are compromised, and both are looking for the other. The film cuts between them constantly, and the symmetry is deliberate: they are the same person with different loyalties, and the film's tragedy is that neither can survive the other.

Scorsese's adaptation of Infernal Affairs moves the story to Boston and expands the runtime, and the additions are mostly good. The film's treatment of class — Costigan's family is working class and criminal-adjacent, Sullivan's is aspirational — gives the parallel a social dimension the original did not have. The therapy subplot, often criticised as extraneous, is the film's only space for interiority.

Read more about crime cinema in our Crime genre hub, explore the work of Martin Scorsese in our directors section, or see where this film lands in best films of the 2000s.

Momentum and Craft

The film is Scorsese's most propulsive since Goodfellas, and Thelma Schoonmaker's editing is the reason. The pacing never settles, and the film's use of drop-in needle drops — the Rolling Stones' 'Gimme Shelter' over the opening, the Dropkick Murphys over the climax — is aggressive in a way that works. Michael Ballhaus' photography is cold and desaturated, and the film's Boston is a place with no warmth in it.

The screenplay by William Monahan is the film's most quotable element, and it is genuinely funny in a way that most crime films are not. The dialogue has a rhythm that the cast clearly relished, and the film's profanity is deployed with real comic timing. That humour is what keeps the film from becoming unbearable, which matters given where it ends up.

Performances

Leonardo DiCaprio's Costigan is the film's emotional centre, and the performance is all suppressed panic. He is the only character in the film who is visibly deteriorating, and the therapy scenes are where that shows most clearly. Matt Damon's Sullivan is the film's more interesting role — a man who has built an entire identity out of a lie and is genuinely competent at his job — and Damon plays the entitlement perfectly.

Jack Nicholson's Costello is the film's most divisive performance. He is enormous, theatrical, and clearly enjoying himself, and the role sits at an odd angle to the film's otherwise naturalistic register. Some viewers find him the film's best element; others find him a distraction from the parallel structure. Mark Wahlberg's Dignam is a genuine highlight, and the performance is the most fun in the film.

The Ending

The final sequence is one of the most abrupt in modern cinema and it is entirely deliberate. Scorsese resolves the central conflict and then keeps going, killing characters the audience has invested in without warning and without ceremony. The effect is genuinely shocking on a first viewing and remains effective on repeat, which is unusual for a twist of this kind.

The film won Scorsese his first Best Director Oscar and Best Picture, which many critics at the time described as a career award for a film that is not his best. That reading is a little unfair. The Departed is a superbly engineered thriller with a genuinely bleak view of institutional loyalty, and it is more than a consolation prize. It is also, notably, one of the few remakes that is arguably the equal of its source.

Themes and ideas

• Identity as performance
• Institutional loyalty and its limits
• Class in Boston
• The impossibility of going back