[7.1/10] I really don’t know what to make of *Shame*. At times it is a meditative look at two people processing unspecified trauma. At others, it’s a softcore porn movie with orchestral music and the standard indie color grading. Sometimes it’s a slow-spun but captivating glimpse of a man trying to reach through his addiction and find genuine relief and connection. At others it’s a dull, banal bit of navel-gazing that plods along until the next bit of graphic gratification. It’s a movie that kept one of my eyebrows raised for almost its entire runtime, that is neither bad nor good, neither insightful nor exploitative, but somewhere in between, which makes it compelling if nothing else.

The film tells the story of Brandon, a sex addict who immigrated from Ireland when he was a teenager who now lives in New York City as an adult. Much of the film’s most intense moments center on his interactions with his sister, appropriately named Sissy, a lounge singer who asks to crash at her brother’s place while she figures some things out. Along the way, Brandon tries to deal with his addiction, with his anger at his sister sleeping with his married boss, and at her discovering his predilections while he tries to make changes and falls back into old habits.

At first glance, *Shame* feels like a an updated imitator of *American Psycho* transposed onto the notion of sex addiction. But rather than satire or comedy, the 2011 film goes for deep introspection, and rounds out its characters in more deep and provocative ways. Brandon is low-key but almost preternaturally effective at satisfying his needs through a multitude of ways. He is not a heartless monster, but a human being who knows both how to hurt and be hurt. There’s a well of anger and pain behind his search for pleasure, for what seems like escape, emotions that his sister brings out.

And at the same time, while Sissy has less anger, she seems to have as much, if not more, pain, and the same sense of brokenness. There is a palpable atmosphere that the two of them have run away to this place, that they have endeavored to escape something, but that whatever it is followed them here, and still affects them in different ways. There’s an unspoken shadow of molestation or other abuse having been visited upon the siblings, one that is, admittedly, speculation on my part, but which seems hinted at on the edges of the film, and manifested in the complicated, at times uncomfortable psycho-sexual fixation the pair seem to have with one another.

What distinguishes the film beyond its sometimes-bold, sometimes-gratuitous subject matter, is the way it’s an absolute showcase for Michael Fassbender as Brandon and Carey Mulligan as Sissy. The former takes a subdued figure, and not only knows when to turn his volume up and down, but manages the find the almost imperceptible shifts in feeling and expression that tell the story of Brandon’s emotional journey is a film almost entirely bereft of exposition. The latter takes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype and finds its dark underbelly, the lingering damage hidden behind the bright eyes of the free spirit who, in a lesser film, might be a prop and not a coequal, but differently-calibrated victim struggling to get by. While at times, the movie loses me, the performances, which are at the center of a film with nowhere else to go, are worth the price of admission.

And while the plot of the film, such at is, is more a restrained current than a driving force for a film that’s more a series of moments than a steady progression, some of those moments linger. At one point in the film, Brandon tries to cut through his innumerable disposable interactions and forge a genuine connection with his coworker-turned-date Marianne. The pair seem to have a certain concordance and chemistry beyond Brandon’s usual quietly predatory or preternatural attractant ways. And yet when he whisks her away to a hotel room in the middle of the day, he can’t perform sexually, as the fear of opening up or relating to another person or building something to last mentally unravels the man who normally cannot keep his appetites in check. It is a dispiriting moment, the deflating of the film’s hope spot for Brandon’s recovery.

Still, the film lands that there is a human connection that can get through to him -- his ties to his sister. As much as that relationship is clearly not a 100% healthy one, as much as Brandon himself is tried by it and tries to sever it, he cares enough to be panicked, to be upset, to be crestfallen when his sister tries to take her own life, in a way that nothing else in his world does. There seem to be some confused sexual feelings there (given some mirrored scenes and strange dynamics between them), potentially ones that stem from one’s abuse of the other, but the combination of love and revulsion, of hatred but longing, strike notes in Brandon’s affect, and his behavior, which nothing else in the world does. The film’s ending leaves it ambiguous whether Brandon’s painful acknowledgment of his connection after the equivalent of a bender devoted to his particular addiction is enough to change his path after, but in an intimate film, it’s the only relationship that moves him.

I admire the subtlety of *Shame*’s approach, its oft-awkward realness, how quiet and patient and unwilling to hold its audience’s hand it is. At times, though, that tack renders the film opaque and even boring. But even when it left me wondering where all this was heading, or if we had to spend this long on a given shot, it was clear to me that there was plenty going on under the hood. At the end of the day, I still don’t know if I like the film, with its strange notes and indie affections alongside its bold and resolute portrait of a slice of abuse and self-destruction, but I do know that I appreciate it.