Shame is the tale of New Yorker Brandon's crippling and life-consuming sex addiction. His sterile, cultivated life is put under further strain when his impulsive, loving but unstable sister, Sissy, comes to stay indefinitely. It is from this point one's investment is lessened to only accommodate for the outer sensory pleasures the film provides: the sights, the sounds, the physical action. The writing is often melodramatic and poorly judged, not fulfilling the pain and intimacy Michael Fassbender's staggering, brave performance is longing for. The scripting, again, does not allow for the revealing depth the narrative should have provided. It instead reads like a show reel of every provocative possibility that may befall the life of a sex addict.
The film is shot beautifully by Sean Bobbitt who shows, more than ever, his eye for capturing an intimate elegance. When merged with the yearning, melancholy score the film evokes far more emotion and thought than any of the dialogue or human contact, which, when the film is based around an uncontrollable lust for human contact, is a problem. If anything, Shame is too controlled, too assured in it's vision to feel organic or naturally unfolding. The film is on the surface genuinely awe inspiring, though the pretension of humanistic reality and profundity is lacking and ultimately far less involving than the film's promise.
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