If you don’t regularly check my movie database homepage you didn’t know Fox Searchlight set a December 2 release date for the fall festival hit Shame from director Steve McQueen and starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. The film will open the same day as Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, which is to say you can watch two separate nightmares in a double-feature should your city choose to show both.
Shame centers on Brandon (Fassbender), a 30-something man living in New York with a sexual addiction whose life is turned upside down when his wayward younger sister (Mulligan) moves into his apartment. It’s a picture that will test its audience and is quite explicit and sure to earn an NC-17 rating as Searchlight has guaranteed they will not ask McQueen to re-edit the picture for an R rating.
I saw Shame in Toronto and took a lot away from it. In fact, the farther I got away from it the more and more it tended to resonate. Here’s the opening paragraph from my Toronto Film Festival review:
Words come to mind to describe Steve McQueen’s Shame; words beyond the title such as unrelenting, physical, pain, sex, disposable, disgust, penetration and need. And in those words you will find the story of a thirty-something man with an uncontrollable sex addiction. It’s an addiction he’s neither proud of nor privately denies he has. McQueen explores this world with a script he co-wrote with playwright Abi Morgan, and he is unforgiving in his intimacy with the material. Yet, to call it intimate almost suggests some measure of delicacy, which isn’t altogether misleading, but it doesn’t imply the destruction we bear witness to.
Today the poster has debuted via The Hollywood Reporter, check it out directly below and for my complete Toronto review of the film click here.
You can browse my gallery of 28 images from Shame and watch a clip from the film right here.
