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There’s technical virtuosity to burn in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s best-seller. But like Peter Jackson’s similarly extravagant version of Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” “Shutter Island” offers very little emotional punch to go along with the visual pizzazz, seeming more a genre exercise than a deeply felt drama. It dazzles the eye but leaves the heart cold, despite the fact that it too deals with the death of children.

And to be honest, it also has very little to offer the mind. Basically Lehane’s story—and the screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis—is a narrative stunt, of the sort that readers of pulp fiction from the forties and fifties will not be unfamiliar with. (For an example check out the 1947 noir “Fear in the Night,” remade in 1956 as “Nightmare,” both of which trace back to a book by Cornell Woolrich published under his pen name, William Irish.)

Set in 1954—a period that production designer Dante Ferretti, art directors Robert Guerra, Christina Wilson and Max Briscoe, set decorator Francesca Lo Schiavo and costume designer Sandy Powell capture unerringly)—it begins with Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) arriving with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) at the forbidding title island in Boston Harbor, where Ashecliffe Hospital, a compound for the criminally insane, is located. They’ve come to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando—a war widow who drowned her three children and has mysteriously disappeared from her heavily-guarded room.

Daniels finds the staff a strange bunch. The head of the operation is Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), who’s coolly welcoming but none too accommodating. His associate, Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow) is oddly sarcastic—and he upsets Daniels by reminding him of his traumatic war experience when he was part of the American forces that liberated Dachau, which he relives in haunting nightmares that alternate with others involving his late wife Dolores (Michelle Williams), who died in a terrible fire. In fact, Daniels’ reason for coming to Ashecliffe, it’s revealed, is partially personal: he believes that the man who set the fatal blaze, Lynch Laeddis (Elias Koteas), is a patient there—something revealed to him by a former inmate, George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley), who also suggested that secret government experiments are being conducted on prisoners in the island’s lighthouse. And the attitude of Warden (Ted Levine) and Deputy Warden (John Carroll) toward the feds proves as peculiar as that of the doctors and their medical staff.

Matters grow more dismaying for Daniels by the hour. A hurricane strikes the island; Aule disappears; and most terrifyingly, the marshal’s ability to separate hallucination from reality begins to deteriorate—the result, perhaps, of drugs being fed him by Cawley. At least that’s what one of two Rachels who show up tells him—a scientist (Patricia Clarkson) who’s hiding in the cliffs from her colleagues, as opposed to the inmate (Emily Mortimer) who suddenly reappears in the hospital.

This is all spooky stuff, and Scorsese plays it to the hilt, abetted by Robert Richardson’s ostentatious cinematography, Thelma Schoonmaker’s sharp editing, and the thunderously ominous background score assembled from modern classical pieces by Robbie Robertson. And the cast throw themselves into the proceedings with glee—Kingsley and von Sydow exuding silken malevolence and Carroll, Koteas, Levine and Haley a brusquer form, Williams a ghostly ambiguity and Ruffalo a properly bewildered air. But DiCaprio dominates with a turn that alternates from snarling anger to terrified uncertainty and finally resignation.

But all the talent behind and in front of the camera is in the service of a creaky haunted house tale, a shaggy dog story that uses themes like the Holocaust and the murder of children for luridly pulpish purposes. You can admire the professionalism on display, but feel more than a little squeamish at the thought of it being employed on such low-minded material. And the big revelation at the end is frankly ridiculous—and is treated in a lumpy Agatha Christie-like sequence of explication that must be intended as a tongue-in-cheek homage to Simon Oakland’s tediously literal summing-up at the end of “Psycho.” But a final twist after it doesn’t possess Hitchcock’s return to Norman Bates’s face and his mother’s voice, contenting itself instead with a gloomy reversal.

In the end “Shutter Island” isn’t dull, but as flamboyant as it is, it’s too contrived to be more than fitfully intriguing. It’s big and noisy, but a minor entry in the Scorsese canon.