Shame

Bookending his semi-experimental portrait of IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands in Hunger, British director Steve McQueen delivers another corporeally potent Michael Fassbender performance, with another thematically prescriptive yet variously interpretable one-word title. Here, co-scripting with Abi Morgan, McQueen posits Fassbender as a fictional Manhattan sex addict who loses (more) control of his life when his wayward younger sister, played by Carey Mulligan, comes to live with him. Theirs is a strong if uneasy sibling bond of mutually assured self-destruction. Sean Bobbitt’s glassy cinematography helps calibrate McQueen’s art-house-specific ratio of compulsion and detachment; the display of sexual directness, mostly deprived of eroticism, has a hollowing effect, and that is clearly the point. The point of that being the point is perhap less clear, but Fassbender’s and Mulligan’s fearlessness is bracing. James Badge Dale and Nicole Beharie co-star.