Shame Steve McQueen’s second picture is a brutally compelling insight into sex addiction and depersonalisation, foregrounded by an extraordinary performance from Michael Fassbender. *****

Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an attractive thirty-something executive living in New York, who is established from the outset as suffering from sex addiction. In the beginning Brandon confines his compulsions to porn, one-night stands and prostitution within a prison of routines – although his boss may  be starting to see into his insalubrious lifestyle declaring that his computer ‘hard-drive is filthy’. Everything begins to change when Brandon’s estranged and dysfunctional sister Sissy(Carey Mulligan) turns up at his flat to stay and causes his destructive lifestyle to unravel.

Although Shame deals with a central character who is addicted to sex, this is not an ‘issues’ movie; sex addiction is not the subject matter of the film – Shame is more a bleak insight into a dehumanised modern world.  With thematic links to his first picture, Hunger(2008), Steve McQueen again focuses on the pain, suffering, incarceration and endurance of the human body, but despite the amount of flesh on show, Shame’s  tortured antihero is tormented far more by what resides beneath the surface. Brandon appears to be following a path reminiscent of Freud’s “death drive” where his addiction to sex is paving the way closer and closer towards the death and destruction of the organic self in favour of something completely inorganic and inhuman. Conflating sex and death also invokes la petite mort or "the little death", an idea describing a post-orgasmic death-like torpor that seems to be reflected in the central character's complete physical and mental lassitude and apathy towards his hollowed out environment. Ultimately this loss of humanity is expressed through the loss of intimacy that is explored devastatingly as Brandon’s porn addiction numbs away his ability to interact with the real world. One particularly effective thread sees Brandon attempting to form a relationship with a woman he seems to be developing genuine feelings for, but one with whom he is unable to perform with sexually because his emotions and sex are so far removed from one another. McQueen masterfully conveys Brandon’s shame and embarrassment through shooting  bleakly detached and clinically lit environments where the central character is often stooped in a thanatosis-like state.

Shame is comprised of an effervescent dialogue of images where speech is often substituted for raw expression. Brandon catches the eye of a young woman in the carriage of the New York subway and their sexual attraction is played out as a conversation of gestures and minute facial expressions that, as an audience member, is both an intensely voyeuristic experience and perversely intoxicating to watch. The same can be said of a scene where Sissy sings New York, New York at a bar in its entirety which causes Brandon to be moved in a way that seems so genuine, personal and private that it's almost too powerful to watch; but it is the extraordinarily understated nature of Fassbender’s riveting performance that always draws you in to the fractured disposition of his character, despite how alienated he often seems to be.