Shame (2011)

Steve McQueen's Shame arrives as a case study in compulsion, presented without a thesis. Brandon, a Manhattan executive with a hard drive full of pornography and an appetite that has swallowed his capacity for intimacy, is played by Michael Fassbender with a physical commitment that borders on the medical. The camera watches. It does not explain, and it does not scold. McQueen and Abi Morgan have built a film about a man drowning in a city that holds no opinion about his drowning, and the result is a chilly, exacting piece of work that declines the comfort of a moral.

The picture's social footprint is faint. Nicole Beharie appears as a co-worker and possible romantic exit, and her presence is treated as ordinary fact, which is its own quiet virtue and also not a program. A late scene in a gay bar registers as one more station on Brandon's descent, not an affirmation of anything. The corporate offices and the adulterous boss supply a hollow professional texture, though the film never converts that texture into an argument about money or class. Sissy's self-harm is rendered with a clinical accuracy that psychiatrists have praised, and it functions as suffering to be witnessed, not as identity to be celebrated. There is no environmental conscience here, no body-acceptance messaging, no historical revisionism, because there is no history at all. The wounds are contemporary and personal.

What keeps the film from sermonizing is McQueen's refusal to speak. He observes, and he lets the silence carry the weight. That restraint is admirable and also limiting. The film's cultural awareness amounts to casting a few faces without comment and letting a sad encounter stand as sad. It is a portrait, not a pamphlet. We are left with a man staring at a woman on a train, and with the distinct sense that nothing has been resolved, which is presumably the point.