Shame Review

Shame is a film that you do not want to see with your parents. This compulsive, often painful-to-watch film entirely puts paid to the idea that an addiction to sex is the best kind of addiction to have. Very few have attempted to tackle it as subject matter, for the simple reason that it must be nigh-on impossible to find an actor bold enough to play such a draining role. Fortunately, Michael Fassbender and director Steve McQueen seem to have a shared affinity for bringing difficult themes and topics to the screen, and to audiences who may not appreciate them. It is to their credit that they do.

Fassbender plays Brandon, a suave, thirtyish New Yorker who has a good job and a cool bachelor pad. He is also driven to orgasm several times a day with pick-ups, prostitutes, porn and masturbation in the worst kind of ways. As soon as he wakes, we hear ticking, as if Brandon is constantly counting down and dreading the point at which he has to find release. Pleasure is the last thing he feels now – a sequence towards the film’s end shows his face in close-up as he tries to come so he can move on with his life until next time. His feelings of anger, pain, frustration and despair all appear on his face at some point during that scene. It looks like the worst way to live. He is stuck in a hellish loop which he appears to have little chance of escaping, and comparisons can be made with American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, a similar character with a very different craving.

The film also stars Carey Mulligan, who does a thoroughly convincing job as Brandon’s sister Sissy, another damaged, self-harming and obsessive soul whose gig singing a stripped-down, self-indulgent version of New York, New York in a trendy jazz bar leads to her sleeping with Brandon’s sleazy, womanising-although-married boss Dave (James Badge Dale). We get hints of the experiences that have shaped the lives the siblings lead, but no more. With the BAFTA nominations newly released, it is a surprise to see Mulligan nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category not for the British-funded-and-produced Shame, but for the American-funded-and-produced Drive, in which she gave a solid but hardly earth-shattering performance. One wonders what goes through the heads of the voters at BAFTA and the Golden Globes sometimes.

This is the second collaboration between Fassbender and McQueen after 2008’s equally powerful Hunger about IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands. One of the stand-out scenes in that film was a single-take medium-shot of Sands and a priest talking for the better part of ten minutes, and McQueen utilises the technique again in Shame during an awkward dinner-date conversation between Brandon and his co-worker Marianne (Nicole Beharie). It looks briefly like he might have a real chance of a proper relationship with her, but once the distance he prefers to keep between him and his sexual partners is broken, he runs into problems once again. By the film’s end, his shame is agonizingly laid bare to the audience. 

The film’s greatest achievement is to help bring mainstream credibility to the notion of sex addiction – Brandon, brilliantly and bravely played by Fassbender, cannot change and lacks the mental strength to do so. There is no happy ending, nor is there likely to be. He can only continue to bear the scars of addiction, humiliation and shame.

4.5/5