Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)

Michael Fassbender joins forces with director McQueen again, following on from their collaboration on the searing Hunger, which followed the last days of the IRA protester Bobby Sands. Fassbender is an actor with a rare self-controlled quality, with a sense of always barely keeping an internal tension in check, which works a dream in this role. He is an outwardly successful New York exec fixated on sex in any form, nominally functional until his unstable sister, played by the also impressive Carey Mulligan, inflicts herself on his fragile balance.
At first it seems there will be no more than meets the eye here, as Fassbender shags to a joyless stupor in scene after scene, reminiscent of Patrice Chéreau's dead-hearted Intimacy (2001) with its tone of emotionally stilted graphic coupling. Then Lodge Kerrigan's Keane (2004), with Damian Lewis as a troubled man struggling with loss in a parallel New York setting, proves to be an empathically closer comparison. But Shame grows from a synthesis of these, with a quiet power, into an involving study of damage and need, with one sibling imploding as the other explodes. It's uncomfortable to watch and fiercely truthful.

8/10