Shame

Director: Steve McQueen, Steve McQueen

2011 / 101min / DCP

Following up his feature debut, Hunger, a grueling depiction of Irish Republican Bobby Sands’s martyrdom through self-starvation, McQueen returned with this very different depiction of masculine self-mortification and the body in extremis. Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a Manhattan executive driven to the extremes of abjection by a tormenting sex addiction, his neatly compartmentalized life turned upside down when his cabaret chanteuse sister (Carey Mulligan) arrives in the city. A harrowing trawl through the city’s nightclubs and hotels, made with rare fidelity to New York’s geography.