Movies

We've become accustomed to laughing off sex addiction. You may not be able to keep it in your pants, we say, but that's not the medical profession's problem.

Well, you won't be laughing after Shame, as you follow Brandon (Michael Fassbender) on his daily course of masturbating in the shower, masturbating in the work toilets, downloading internet porn, finding real women to have sex with, and dodging calls from his needy younger sister. The sex is all about pleasure, but it's completely devoid of joy.

These sequences are very confronting, but the movie has a softer, familial heart: It's concerned with Brandon's relationship with his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), and the way his sexual fixation inhibits him from really bonding with her when she so clearly needs him. She blows into his apartment looking for somewhere to stay, and it seems impossible that his life could cope with such an intrusion.

The relationship between them is fascinating — you're forever watching for subtle signs of what these two complicated people with hints of something messed up in their history really think and feel about each other.

Fassbender and Mulligan are both incredibly magnetic performers able to communicate a lot with a little, which is why they're both so in-demand right now. (There's a theory going around that the only reason Fassbender missed out on an Oscar nod was that buzz about his anatomical gifts eclipsed that of his acting gifts. See: George Clooney's Golden Globes speech.)

Shame is the second film from artist/director Steve McQueen. His first effort was the Sydney Film Prize-winning story of the Irish hunger strikes, Hunger, and may he go on rendering one-word emotions with such unforgettable power and style.

His film is incredibly bleak without laying the melodrama on thick, and it sets the standard in indie drama.