New at Reason: Kurt Loder on Shame

December 1, 2011

The sexual furies that roil the new movie Shame are startlingly graphic for a mainstream release, writes Kurt Loder. The film’s protagonist, Brandon Sullivan, played with fearless commitment by Michael Fassbender, is an emotional zombie anonymously employed in a glass-and-steel cubical farm in high-rise Manhattan. His consuming interest is an unending search for sexual release—with prostitutes, with nightly pickups, often with himself in office bathroom stalls and laptop porn sessions in his sterile midtown apartment. It’s not much of a life, but it’s all that this priapic automaton requires.

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