Shame stares unblinking into the abyss of sexual addiction

What you need to know

Shame is written and directed by the British conceptual artist Steve McQueen, creator of the harrowing 2008 Irish drama Hunger about Bobby Sands, the Irish republican who led a hunger strike. The script is co-written by Abi Morgan, the screenwriter behind the recent BBC series The Hours and the Thatcher bio-pic The Iron Lady.
 
Michael Fassbender, who also played the lead in Hunger, stars as Brandon, a sex addict living in New York. In Shame, Brandon's emotionally empty but sex-filled life is interrupted by the arrival of his troubled, fragile sister, played by Carey Mulligan (An Education).
 
With full-frontal nudity, masturbation and scenes of group sex, Shame was unsurprisingly awarded an NC-17 rating by the US censor for its "explicit sexual content". The rating, which restricts anyone under the age of 18 from attending, is often regarded as Box Office death. But the film's US distributor Fox Searchlight publicly embraced the rating, calling it a "badge of honour". In Britain it has an 18 certificate.
 
What the critics like

This is a dispassionate treatment of a disturbing topic, and therein lies its power, says Kenneth Turan in The Los Angeles Times. Sexually graphic yet made with a restraint that's both unflinching and unnerving, "this is a psychologically claustrophobic film that strips its characters bare literally and figuratively, leaving them, and us, nowhere to hide."
 
Turner Prize-winning filmmaker McQueen's rare attempt to depict male sex addiction is an "unqualified masterwork", says Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Broader, richer, subtler and yet more accessible than Hunger, it confirms McQueen and Fassbender as "a fearsome double act".
 
Fassbender and Mulligan are dynamite, says Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Fassbender delivers a bold and brilliantly immersive performance as a sex addict, and is "so raw and riveting you won't be able to take your eyes off him". Mulligan, who plays his sister, is in every way sensational. When a relentless close-up focuses on her singing New York, New York she makes that one number "into a movie all its own".
 
What they don't like

Masturbation, followed by office computer porn, then prostitutes and trips to the backrooms of gay bars – it's exhausting, says John Patterson in The Guardian. This "brutal and harrowing" story "doesn't make for comfortable viewing, or for particularly erotic fare".
 
It is one of those simultaneously explicit and puritanical sex-movies, adds Patterson. "One almost feels ready to part ways with McQueen after one too many lengthy and invasive close-ups."
 
McQueen's main interest in tackling extreme material seems to be in showing he can tame it, says Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. The result is "pure and pitiless" and oddly disapproving.
 
"Emotional nullity matched to stylistic impersonality isn't a winning combination, says Anthony Quin in The Independent. "But the film almost gets away with it, thanks to Fassbender's trapped satyr, writhing in the flames of his own porn hell." ·