Shame

In Steve McQueen’s (no, not that one) second feature film, a successful thirty-something yuppie (Michael Fassbender) spends his free time attending fancy bars and sleeping with beautiful women in downtown Manhattan. But don’t let the premise fool you: what initially may sound like Sex & the City for single men is actually a shocking, often disturbing venture into the dark and lonely world of a sex addict.

The opening scenes set the tone perfectly. One moment we see our protagonist Brandon lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, silently contemplating what we can only imagine to be a string of depraved acts with some woman (women?) he most likely does not remember meeting the night before. Next, we see him on the subway, eyeballing a pretty blonde sitting across from him. But what starts off as a flattering glance soon turns into a chilling, predatorial stare that instantly undoes the attraction that was building up to that point.

Shame, like its protagonist, is not a film of many words. It is an intelligent, at times complex piece of filmmaking that exposes very little about its characters, leaving the audience to interpret what they can from their actions on-screen. Here, a prolonged, uncomfortable silence can be far more revealing than a sappy, over-acted monologue.

McQueen has imported all of his directorial traits that were on show in Hunger (long takes, intimate, close-up shots of his characters) and uses them to deliver a series of sex scenes that feel brutal, visceral, but never gratuitous. His depiction of the Big Apple is also as dark as the source material: this is a New York where yuppies snort coke, strangers fuck (for lack of a more fitting word) in dark alleys and a murder scene is never too far away. Put simply, it is the kind of New York where you’d expect to run into Travis Bickle.

At the centre of all the squalor is Michael Fassbender, in what must be the role of his career. Seamlessly swerving between subtle and intense, his Brandon is a man who constantly necessitates sex but is petrified by intimacy. The corrosive relationship he shares with his unstable sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) is never explained (“We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place” quivers Mulligan), yet bizarrely it is the closest the film comes to having a heart. Both actors turn in fiercely brave performances, not least because of the amount of time they spend fully naked: Fassbender may just go down as history’s first actor to be filmed taking a wee in the buff.

It may be the closest you’ll ever come to seeing a porn flick in your local cinema, but Shame is one of those rare, audacious films that dares you not to flinch at the gruesome reality that is being portrayed on-screen. The final 20 minutes will test even the sternest of viewers.

5/5