Shame is 100 minutes of the most un-erotic porn you’ll ever watch. With an 18-rating, it could be more accurately titled, Michael Fassbender’s Penis. However, only the characters’ bodies are exposed while their emotions are left buried; it’s one of the most effective, but frustrating devices of the film.

Fassbender’s Brandon, an affluent NYC businessman, is a sex addict. Like an alcoholic that needs vodka with his breakfast, Brandon cannot go through a workday without jerking off in the office bathroom or looking at porn along with his spreadsheets. He picks up more than just a cocktail at happy hour and returns to his ironically sterile apartment to look at, you guessed it, more porn. Even with Fassbender’s striking cheekbones and other features to look at, his life is dull to watch. Director Steve McQueen deprives the film of any colour. The opening scene depicts Brandon lying on an icy blue duvet looking cadaverous. It’s only when his troubled sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan, now typecast as a washed up 20-something) starts crashing on his couch that Brandon has to re-evaluate his life.

However, McQueen wisely decides not to make this a film about redemption. Instead of going to therapy, we watch Brandon on bad dates, where his fear of intimacy renders him impotent. McQueen artfully juxtaposes intense graphic sex scenes with slow camera pans, which gives us our best chance at understanding the psychology of Brandon’s affliction. Fassbender manages to transform Brandon’s blankness into a portrait of an emotionally stunted man, who we don’t always like, but ultimately, sympathise with.

But what is the origin of this eponymous shame? The disturbingly no-boundaries relationship Brandon shares with his sister alludes to some past family trauma, but it’s never elucidated. Instead, Sissy utters cryptic statements like, “We come from a bad place.” In effect, the film leaves too much unanswered and we’re left wondering what the point of it even is.

Shame offers us a tense exposé of a sex addict, but leaves the viewer as unfulfilled as Brandon is by emotionally vacuous benders.