A review of 'Shame'

Steve McQueen’s second cinematic offering is best described as a character-study of Brandon (Michael Fassbender) a handsome and successful thirty-something who lives in an expensive Manhattan apartment. Although we are not told of the nature of its business, it is evident the company he works for in New York City is flourishing. Away from work though, Brandon is a sex addict who seeks sexual encounters at every opportunity. The less intimate or emotionally meaningful these encounters are, the more Brandon likes it. We discover he has a disdain for long term or meaningful relationships (his longest is four months) and that he collects and watches porn obsessively.

Suddenly, Brandon’s younger sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), arrives back into his life. Sissy is a drifter with no money or job and stays at her brother’s apartment to his obvious displeasure. The film then charts Brandon’s relationship with Sissy and the way in which his destructive personality affects those around him.

From a technical standpoint there is much to be admired in Shame. Sean Bobbit’s cinematography is, at times, beautiful. Cold greys and dark muted shades provide a haunting backdrop to the turmoil that is evident within Brandon. On the occasions when it compliments the cinematography, McQueen’s direction can be stunning. Although McQueen often overuses long takes in this film, he pulls off a stunning long take taken either from a car or an enormous piece of tracking as we follow Brandon as he jogs across several blocks of Manhattan.

There are, however, aspects of the film’s technique that do not work so effectively. McQueen is often guilty of providing the age-old error of style over substance. While that sounds like a film critic’s cliché, Shame really is guilty of this film making sin on numerous occasions. Many of cinema’s great directors possess hugely pronounced and often flamboyant visual styles and flourishes. However, the works of Stanley Kubrick and Michael Mann, for example, are notable for their employment of visual style to act as a storytelling device; something that can generate and aid understanding of the story and its characters and our overall reading of the film. Steve McQueen’s use of visual style, in the case of Shame, fails for the most part in achieving the goal achieved by the above directors. At times his key visual stylistic devices feel like empty gestures to showcase his technical skills. Incredibly long static shots begin with us, the audience, thinking about what we are seeing in a reflective and cerebral way but after the shot lingers for too long, we begin to think less about the film we are watching and more about the technique itself. Put simply, McQueen’s over emphasis on style takes the attention away from the film we are seeing and draws it back to McQueen himself as we question how and why certain techniques were used and achieved.


Michael Fassbender’s (below) performance as Brandon is very good yet his excellent performance still does not prevent his character from being emotionally unengaging. The lack of emotional investment we afford to the film’s central character actually spreads to other key members of the cast and the three characters of Brandon, Dave and Sissy are all rather unlikeable.

The lack of audience sympathy is key to this film’s shortcomings. While having unlikable characters does not always mean a film should be a failure, the lack of any kind of humour and the self-importance that radiates from every frame of Shame, means the audience can feel alienated rather than engaged. There is one moment of humour in Shame when Brandon’s boss, Dave, lists some of the types of porn that have clogged up Brandon’s office hard drive: ‘anal, double anal, cream pies….I don’t even know what that is.’ This comes as a blessed relief as the rest of film is so devoid of humour or any kind of light moment.

Mary Harron’s flawed film version of American Psycho constantly sprang to mind while watching Brandon’s antics in this film. In many ways, Brandon and Patrick Bateman are very similar characters. Both work in high-powered jobs in New York City, both are sex addicts who sometimes pay for this addiction and both indulge readily in drugs and porn. On the surface, Patrick Bateman is actually far more unlikable than Shame’s Brandon. However, American Psycho succeeds where Shame fails because of its lacing of black humour throughout. Patrick Bateman, while a monster, is a very funny character. He is far more evil than Brandon; he is a murderer after all but there is no doubt which character people will remember in the future and whose lines will be quoted.

McQueen’s (below) direction can often feel somewhat heavy-handed and themes and motifs are unnecessarily and continuously hammered home. It is established fairly early into the film that Brandon is a compulsive person with an addictive personality whose preoccupation with sexual encounters leaves him unhappy, unfulfilled and points towards an unstable and disturbed personality. With these powerful traits established, McQueen and writer Abi Morgan would surely have been better suited to then chart Brandon’s journey and try and discover how this behaviour affects those around him. While McQueen does attempt this to a point, such as when Brandon goes on a date and then engages in a disastrous sexual encounter with co-worker, Marianne, there is a general feeling of indifference and of things being unresolved.

Expressing this point is not easy. Films that merely take audiences on a character’s typical journey of discovery where they learn new things and resolve their particular dramatic issues can often be boring. There are many examples of characters not learning, of things being unresolved and of the typical character arcs and journeys not being so rigidly followed. However, for these kind of unorthodox narratives to work, audiences have to have, at the very least, an emotional investment in the central characters or as is the case in Shame, the audience will struggle to care about the fate of Brandon and those around him.

Shame constantly tells the audience via Brandon’s different sexual encounters with a variety of women (and in one case, a man) everything we already know about him. So, as each explicit sex scene follows another, we become increasingly desensitized and less interested. There is, of course, the argument that says that these repeated and increasingly numbing sex scenes can take us into the mind of Brandon so that we may know how unfulfilled and depressed he is. Doing this, though, ultimately fails and shows that McQueen has underestimated his audience. The point is made early on and to repeat it throughout the film does not add anything new but adds to a feeling of gratuity and neither increases understanding or sympathy of the characters.

Shame is by no means a bad film and at times it can be captivating. In the opinion of this reviewer, however, its flaws outweigh its strengths.