"We’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place."

Shame is about addiction, but it comes at addiction from a less direct angle than I would have expected. To me, it feels like Brandon's sex addiction is a collateral consequence of his severe dissociation. It's his way of acting out his own sense of isolation. Of demonstrating his separateness to himself.

To Brandon, sex is not a connective experience. And it's a very specific sort of sex that he pursues. He needs a dissociative sexual experience. So this means, he craves sex with strangers - sometimes with multiple partners - to be performed in a sort of manic frenzy in a limited social transaction that is necessarily shortened. The one time we see him try to connect sexually with someone he actually cares for, he is incapable of physically completing the act. There is no joy in his meaningless sexual encounters other than perhaps the animalistic joy of instant gratification. He even extends the compulsion to manic bouts of masturbation in narrow windows of opportunity at work and at home. There are many facets to Michael Fassbender's magnificent performance, but the sheer anguish on his face in these agonising scenes is one of the most brilliant.

So really, the film is a mystery, because although it shows us Brandon's sexual fixation in unflinching (and epically unerotic) detail, the real nature of his deep internal tragedy is only ever hinted at, at best. There's clearly something in the history between himself and his sister - I think strongly suggested to be sexual. But again, I suspect any sexual contact between the two was likewise a coping mechanism for some sort of shared trauma. It feels inevitable that they must have been victims of abuse, but the film never gets close to attempting to explain any of that - McQueen's fine judgement is too impeccable to blunder into that territory.

McQueen's sparse direction is a perfect fit for this portrait of a man lost in the bleak empty spaces outside of healthy human relationships. Long, observant takes that require our patience - but the patience is repaid by a sense of the distance between Brandon and the life he longs for but seemingly has already given up on ever attaining. Harry Escott's score is truly gorgeous - but McQueen withholds it from us for most of the film, only allowing it to swell as Brandon finally finds himself cast adrift from his own dysfunctional coping mechanisms - spiralling into a nightmare of sexual self-negation. When the music comes back, we are finally hit with the immensity of the sadness that is Brandon's existence.

A beautiful, finely judged film.