Dumbshow are Barking (and in Camden too)

To make up for a few days without a review, and a slight delay with my new WhatCulture! article, here's a little something to tide you over, courtesy of Dumbshow Theatre Company.

Three of Dumbshow's members, two of whom were in the cast of Clockheart Boy, have written a new 30-minute radio play called BARKING. It's a really good dark comedy about one's neighbours, and you can download or stream it from their website here.

If, while you're there, you click on the 'Blog' tab (or just click here if you're really lazy), then you can also subscribe to their podcast. The episodes are pretty infrequent, but when a new one comes along it's usually full of good stuff.

Oh, and one more thing - if you happen to be in Camden on December 8th, you might want to hang around the Camden People's Theatre. Why? Because this will be happening: http://www.dumbshow.org/shows/youtopia

Daniel

Read More

CULT CLASSIC: Day of the Dead (1985)

Day of the Dead (USA, 1985)
Directed by George A. Romero
Starring Lori Cardille, Joseph Pilato, Terry Alexander, Jarlath Conroy

While Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead have both been embraced as horror icons, Day of the Dead has never quite got the credit or attention it deserves. All too often it is seen as a footnote to George A. Romero's early work with zombies, being generally regarded as watchable but weaker than its predecessors. In fact, it represents a return to form, rounding off the Dead Trilogy with one of the bleakest, most nihilistic films of the 1980s.

There are three probable reasons why Day of the Dead has been so underrated. Firstly, Romero spent less of the intervening years experimenting; while he had tried to diversify after Night with mixed success, after Dawn he made the little-seen oddity Knightriders before returning to the horror genre with Creepshow, based on the stories by Stephen King. Secondly, the horror genre had moved on substantially since the first two films, with Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead and David Cronenberg's Videodrome pushing the limits of gore and plastic reality. In the face of both these things, Day of the Dead must have felt like Romero retreating to what he knew, producing something that seemed more by-the-numbers, when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

Thirdly, and perhaps most pertinently, the film suffered from big production problems. Romero set out to make what he called "the Gone with the Wind of zombie movies", increasing the number of locations to truly capture what a global zombie apocalypse would look like. But during pre-production the budget was slashed from $7m to $3.5m, forcing Romero into drastic re-writes. The shooting conditions were so humid that Tom Savini's props failed regularly, causing delays that eventually led to cast and crew sleeping at the locations to cut down on travel time. This would certainly account for both the rough-and-ready aesthetic of the film and the often crazed performances within it.

As before, this is a symbolic continuity with the previous instalments in the trilogy. There are a new group of characters, but they are again comprised of three men and a woman. We begin visually where Dawn left off, in a helicopter looking for survivors in an area that has been overrun by zombies. The shot of the useless dollar bills blowing in the wind both nods back to the commercialism storyline of Dawn and informs us that things are now a lot worse. And we have another black protagonist, although this time the female character is a lot stronger and more resourceful than her predecessors.

This time around the zombies do not represent racism, commercialism or the fallout of Vietnam. The film tackles a number of themes, including vivisection, social conditioning and the relationship between science and the military, with the zombies playing some part in all three. Romero described the film as "a tragedy about how a lack of human communication causes chaos and collapse even in this small little pie slice of society". This time the threat is endemic rather than able to be contained, and with humanity firmly on the back foot, the people who are left are bickering over how to survive.

Just as Martin was Romero's take on Dracula and vampire mythology, so you could describe Day of the Dead as a retelling of Frankenstein. One of the scientists at the base is severely unhinged, convinced to the point of madness that he can prevent or reverse human decay, which is being accelerated by the zombie plague. Having discovered ways to isolate and revive dead flesh from numerous, illegally-sourced specimens, he proceeds to create a lucid creature in Man's image - only instead of sewing one together from used parts, he is trying to reawaken the humanity within the walking dead. The monster learns to obey his master, but is still regarded as a monster even as (or perhaps because) it displays human characteristics.

The allusions to Frankenstein illuminate what makes Day of the Dead so successful: it makes the zombies terrifying by making them intelligent. While Dawn often reduced the zombies down to cannon fodder, for the characters to wade through and pick off at their leisure, this film returns to the territory of Night by making them rational creatures, who not only resemble us physically but have the same capacity for memory and learning. The scene where Bub shoots Captain Rhodes is tragic despite our antipathy towards his character: he is brutally murdered by something with a formative understanding of good and evil, with Frankenstein's monster turning on the people who made him (albeit indirectly).

In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live, John Landis remarked that stories about monsters, whether literary or cinematic, were often very conservative works. He argued that they shored up the authority of the church and state by showing the darker side of scientific progress, or the extremes to which 'science' could go if not properly checked. This idea is conveyed here by the conflict between the scientists, whose experiments have no real time constraints, and the military led by Captain Rhodes, who follow strict rules and only want useable results. Our main protagonists are civilians caught in the middle of this powder keg, with survival resting on their leaders' ability to balance the power.

Even considering the dark tone of zombie movies in general, Day of the Dead is impressive for just how bleak it is. Where the previous two films entertained the possibility, however slim, that there was hope for humanity, here we are very much in the endgame. The majority of scenes are set underground, whether in the base, the caves or the mine, and the war being fought is not one of conquest but of containment. There is a feeling that the zombies have already won, with the military entertaining the scientists' mad schemes as a desperate last resort in the absence of more men, more ammunition, or better ideas.

 

This nihilism is reinforced by the overhanging influence of John Carpenter. The score by John Harrison, who also scored Creepshow, is of the same minimalistic, electronic ilk that Carpenter has made his trademark. The tone is as bleak and pessimistic as The Thing, and like that film the characters spend a great deal of their time being paranoid about their own security or identity. And there is a vague connection to Assault on Precinct 13, insofar as both films involve disparate groups of characters fighting together to contain a shifting threat.

Even by the standards of its predecessor, Day of the Dead is incredibly gory. Despite the failures that occurred on set, Tom Savini pulls out all the stops, delivering a series of distinctive deaths which will delight and satisfy gore-hounds. There are a lot of really gross moments, the most memorable being Captain Rhodes' death: the film employs latex rubber in a further connection to The Thing, stretching out the Captain's limbs until his whole body is destroyed. But for all the squirming it induces, the gore does loosely fit the tone, complimenting (however literally) the feeling that everything around us is falling apart.

The performances in Day of the Dead are by and large pretty good. Lori Cardille is the stand-out as Sarah Bowman; she manages to play the voice of reason and strength without coming across either as a whiny bitch or an empty stereotype. Jarlath Conroy gives her good support as Bill, even though it takes a while to get over his uncanny resemblance to Rowan Atkinson. Joseph Pilato and Richard Liberty are hamming it up as Rhodes and 'Frankenstein', but this kind of makes sense giving the emotional state of their respective characters.

There are a couple of problems with Day of the Dead. It is more narratively free-form that Night, being shorter than its predecessor but also quite slow and loose in places. The symbolism is less obvious but also more convoluted, while occasionally hampers its ability to build tension. And like Dawn, the ending doesn't quite work, with one too many jump scares and dream sequences undermining the dark intelligence of the third act.

 

Day of the Dead is an improvement on its immediate predecessor which ends Romero's Dead Trilogy on something of a high note. While it has similar problems to Dawn in terms of pacing, it is narratively and thematically more fleshed-out, developing its characters to a greater extent and justifying its bleak, nihilistic tone. Whatever shortcomings his later zombie work has had, this remains an intriguing, engrossing and often chilling offering.

Read More

BRIT PICK: Skyfall (2012)

Skyfall (UK/ USA, 2012)
Directed by Sam Mendes
Starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes 

IMDb Top 250: #237 (24/11/12)

Like any long-running film franchise or TV series, it is interesting to note the ways in which the Bond series has acknowledged its longevity. While the 10th, 20th and 30th anniversaries passed by relatively quietly, with no films being released to coincide, the 40th anniversary was marked by Die Another Day, a greatest hits compilation with little narrative pull which was in hindsight downright embarrassing. 

Skyfall is a more confident and impressive offering all round, marking the 50th anniversary with a film which looks far back into the series' past while also making a conscious effort to appear modern and cutting-edge. The result is technically superb, with Sam Mendes bringing weight to the characters and the visuals being some of the best in the whole series. But the film also demonstrates how fundamentally little Bond has changed, something which is cause for both concern and celebration.

The Bond series has always been at its best whenever it has had to defend its existence. The previous attempts at reinvention - Casino Royale, and Goldeneye before that - were prompted by perceptions that the series was old-fashioned, caused respectively by the game-changing Bourne series and the end of the Cold War. But while these films are impressive technical exercises, which still feel in isolation like a breath of fresh air, the basic formula has remained more or less the same. The series has become so much of a genre of its own that any claim of reinvention or radical departure should be greeted with extreme caution.

Bond has always assimilated ideas and stories raised in other films; it's one of the many ways the series has stayed relevant, or at least appeared that way. Skyfall continues to follow the trail blazed by Bourne by showing the extent of high-tech surveillance, and how advances in communications have changed the way that decisions are taken about people's lives. Both the villain and the revamped Q branch borrow from The Social Network, a film which argued that the world is now run not by governments but by technical wizards, and by extension how 'nerds' have grown from being perceived as harmless and weak into a force to be reckoned with.

Skyfall also contains a number of prominent visual references to other films, past and present. The entire sequence in Shanghai owes a massive debt to Blade Runner: the shot of Bond's gun in moving close-up and the fight against the Japanese signage are eerily close to Ridley Scott's masterpiece. There are also touches of Inception present in the lift scene and on the villain's island, whose ruined buildings could have come straight from Christopher Nolan's Limbo.

On top of all that, the film contains a great many nods to its own back catalogue. Much of the plot, while appearing original, hints back to conversations in Goldeneye. The allusions to Bond's parents are akin to the scene with 006 among the fallen idols, and the central duality is structured along the same lines: like Alec Trevelyan, Silva was betrayed by his homeland, and represents what Bond could have been had things turned out slightly differently. The appearance of the DB5 and the journey "back in time" to Scotland is a direct nod to the Connery era, Silva has a passing resemblance to Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me, and there are two passing references to The Man with the Golden Gun, in Shanghai and with the shooting of the mirror at Skyfall.

The key point here is that everything we see, we have seen before, either in the Bond series or in the many other films on which it draws. What makes Skyfall memorable is the way in which these ideas are presented or repackaged so that they appear either original or become distinctive to the character. Having an abundance of references was largely to be expected, considering the occasion that is being marks, and if nothing else the film scores over Die Another Day by actually having a coherent and interesting story.

The central irony about Skyfall is that its story is very much anti-Bond, but it is being told in a by-the-numbers, classic Bond way. The story is a not-too-distant cousin to The Ipcress File or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, insofar as it uses a troubled yet distinctly British protagonist to focus on the changing mechanics of the secret service, particularly the ways in which technology is altering or eroding the role of agents. This is reflected in the numerous scenes of M answering to politicians, the increasing dominance of Q branch and the conversations between M and Mallory.

But whereas Tomas Alfredson went against the grain, openly eschewing the conventions of a spy thriller, Sam Mendes tells this story in the manner of the classic Bonds. We go through the same motions as all the Bond films after Diamonds are Forever: after a riveting pre-title sequence, Bond comes in and is sent on a mission. He snoops around with an attractive sidekick and/ or love interest, who despite seeming more forthright and independent still takes a back seat, in more ways than one. After several fights with secondary villains, he and the main antagonist meet and talk about the plot. There then ensues a cat-and-mouse chase over several locations, eventually resulting in Bond triumphing, sometimes with a deep personal cost.

If we try to see Skyfall as a genuine reinvention of the Bond series, we will quickly come unstuck as these clichés keep coming. No-one has yet had the confidence to fully abandon Bond's gadgets, vodka martinis or inherent sexual magnetism; even when Timothy Dalton made him cruel and dangerous, the character was still placed within conventional surroundings. If, on the other hand, we see this as a genre exercise, whose mechanics we know inside out, then the film takes flight and becomes remarkable. It's like a well-directed production of The Mousetrap: predictable and silly, but presented so confidently that it becomes endearing.

 

Taken purely as a Bond film, Skyfall is an incredibly well-made addition to the series. Despite its prominent references to other films, it is visually distinctive and spectacular. The film is shot by the fantastic Roger Deakins, who collaborated with Mendes on Jarhead and Revolutionary Road. He paints the film in a number of metallic greys and silvers, giving the action a polished sheen even in its most kinetic moments. Mendes' camerawork compliments him very well, relying less on Bourne-inflected hand-held work and more on longer, sweeping shots to establish the scale of the locations.

Mendes also comes up trumps in making us care about the characters. It's tempting to just view them as archetypes and therefore let the film wash over us, but even with all our cynicism we do invest in Bond and the people around him. Daniel Craig is beginning to rival Dalton for the title of Best Bond, continuing the intensity he cultivated in the last two films and really showing the strain of the character. Javier Bardem may be more pantomime than his performance in No Country for Old Men, but he's still intimidating, and his introductory shot is one of the best in the series.

Judi Dench remains compelling as M, and the film takes the time to show how her relationship with Bond has developed over the series. While Bernard Lee's M more or less stayed the same, her M has gone from calling Bond a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" to some form of emotional kinship. Elsewhere Ben Whishaw impresses as Q, clearly drawing on Brains from Thunderbirds, and Ralph Fiennes is in his element as Mallory, though at times he tips over into his performance is Victor Quartermaine in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Skyfall is a highly enjoyable and technically impressive way to mark 50 years of James Bond. It's nothing like as ground-breaking as has been claimed, with all the clichés of the series being celebrated in amongst the subterfuge. But as a genre piece in and of itself, it delivers on almost every level, thanks to the believable central performances and Mendes' assured direction. The only question that remains is whether these high standards can be sustained.

Read More

IMDb Top 250 Update

Back in late-August, I did a post about the IMDb Top 250 list and posted links to all the films within this list that I've reviewed. Not to blow my own trumpet, but I got a lot of good feedback on it and have decided to keep at it.

Every 3 months I'll give you guys an update on how I'm doing. As before there'll be a list to a review for each film I've seen, with the ones in blue being films that I need to revisit and the ones in red being ones that scored less than 3/5 and therefore, as far as I'm concerned, shouldn't be there.

If you like what you've read, either here or in the original post, you can chart your progress at http://www.250films.net/. You can also download a widget from there to post on your own blog, like I do on the right-hand side.

So, without further ado, let's see how far I've come in three months...

----

1. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
2. The Godfather (1972)
3. The Godfather Part II (1974)
4. Pulp Fiction (1994)
7. Schindler's List (1993)
8. The Dark Knight (2008) - review 
9. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - review 
11. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - review 
13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - review 
14. Inception (2010) - review 
15. Goodfellas (1990)
16. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - review 
18. The Matrix (1999) 
19. Forrest Gump (1994)
21. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) - review 
24. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 
26. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
27. The Usual Suspects (1995) - review
32. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - review 
34. Memento (2000) - review 
36. Apocalypse Now (1979) - review 
37. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
38. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) - review 
39. Saving Private Ryan (1998) - review 
40. Alien (1979) - review 
43. Spirited Away (2001) - review 
44. Citizen Kane (1941)
46. The Shining (1980) 
47. Vertigo (1958) - review 
48. American Beauty (1999)
49. Taxi Driver (1976) 
50. Back to the Future (1985)
52. The Departed (2006) - review 
57. Aliens (1986) - review 
58. WALL-E (2008) - review 
60. A Clockwork Orange (1971) - review - podcast 
61. Amelie (2001)
62. Gladiator (2000) 
63. The Green Mile (1999)
68. The Prestige (2006) - review 
69. Reservoir Dogs (1992) - review 
72. The Third Man (1949) - review 
73. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - review 
75. Cinema Paradiso (1988) - review 
76. Chinatown (1974) - review 
79. The Lion King (1994)
80. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) - review 
81. Full Metal Jacket (1987) - review 
82. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) - review - podcast 
87. Metropolis (1927) - review 
92. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
94. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
97. The Sting (1973) - review 
98. Princess Mononoke (1997) - review 
100. Die Hard (1988)
103. Batman Begins (2005) - review 

104. Pan's Labyrinth (2006) - review 
106. Downfall (2005) 
109. The Great Escape (1963)
112. Up (2009) - review 
114. The Elephant Man (1980) - review 
116. The Seventh Seal (1957) 
117. Toy Story (1995)
123. The Avengers (2012) - review 
124. Blade Runner (1982) - review - podcast
126. Fargo (1996)
130. The Big Lebowski (1998) 
132. The Deer Hunter (1978) - review  
134. Sin City (2005)
137. Jaws (1975) - review 
138. No Country for Old Men (2007) - review 
144. The Thing (1982) - review - podcast  
146. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 
147. The Wizard of Oz (1939) 
148. Trainspotting (1996) 
150. Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

152. Notorious (1946) - review 
155. The King's Speech (2011) - review 
156. Gone with the Wind (1939) - review 

160. Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) 
161. Finding Nemo (2003)  
162. V for Vendetta (2006) - review
169. The Terminator (1984)
170. Black Swan (2011) - review 
175. There Will Be Blood (2007) - review 
179. Twelve Monkeys (1995) - review 
181. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) - review 
185. Gandhi (1982) - review
188. The Artist (2011) - review 
189. Howl's Moving Castle (2004) - review 
190. The Princess Bride (1987) - review 
192. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - review 
197. A Beautiful Mind (2001) 
199. Rocky (1976) 
203. Sleuth (1972) 

211. Ratatouille (2007) - review
212. The Truman Show (1998) - review 
213. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
214. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) - review 
220. Monsters Inc. (2001)
223. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
225. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) - review 
227. La Haine (1995) - review 
230. Rain Man (1988)
232. Shutter Island (2010) - review 
236. Skyfall (2012) - REVIEW FORTHCOMING
238. Big Fish (2003) - review 
239. Let The Right One In (2008) - review 
242. The Night Before Christmas (1993)
244. The Untouchables (1987)
245. Jurassic Park (1993)

This brings my total to 111, only 2 higher than last time. My review of Skyfall will be along shortly to make up for this.

Daniel

Read More

BRIT PICK: Shame (2011)

Shame (UK, 2011)
Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Beharie

Ever since Paul Verhoeven torched his career with Showgirls, the NC-17 rating has been forever associated with soft-core porn. While in Britain 18-certificate films earn their rating and can still be box-office hits (like Dredd 3D), in America the NC-17 is seen as a last resort if a film cannot be cut to get an R rating - and if it doesn't get that R rating, the chances are that no-one will pay to see it.

At this point I could launch into a lecture about the perceived infantilism of both the MPAA and the movie-going public; if you want that argument presented coherently and without a hint of snobbery, go and watch This Film Is Not Yet Rated. All I will say is that it is a great... pity that so few people got to see Shame the first time round. Like Showgirls it is so unashamedly explicit that only the highest rating could have sufficed. But while Verhoeven's film has little between its ears other than Elizabeth Berkley's cleavage, this is a bold and powerful work which cements Steve McQueen as a director and Michael Fassbender as a truly great actor.

Being a film about sex which works hard to turn its audience off, the natural reference point for Shame would be Eyes Wide Shut. Both films have main characters who are urbane, middle-class and seemingly confident, and both Stanley Kubrick and Steve McQueen are exceptional visual craftsmen. In each case we are introduced to a glossy world surrounded on all sides by wealth and success, until an element is introduced which throws the central character's life off-course: in Kubrick's case, it is the wife confessing to adultery, in McQueen's, the arrival of the wayward sister.

 

If you wanted to stretch the comparison, you could make the argument that both films are about depicting a form of sexual jealousy. In Kubrick's case, he wanted to explore the destructive effect that jealousy and adultery can have on relationships, reducing sexual satisfaction down to something that is almost banal, to hammer home how self-defeating these desires can be. Shame, on the other hand, depicts jealousy more abstractly, with Brandon's longing for satisfaction not being borne out of revenge.

 

It is interesting to note that cinematic attitudes towards nymphomania are often the complete opposite to attitudes in wider Western culture. Films like Horrible Bosses depict female nymphomania as something humorous or even attractive, while in wider society female promiscuity and sexual confidence is frowned upon, to the point where the way that women dress is often used (wrongfully) to justify violence against them. Conversely, male promiscuity in society is almost something to boast about, and yet depictions of promiscuity on film are pretty negative outside of gross-out comedies.

While it does correspond to these wider trends, at least to some degree, there can be no denying the power of Shame in its depiction of sex addiction. The film is confident enough to avoid romanticising or excusing the lifestyle of its central character; while we are meant to envy Brandon's wealth or success, we are never expected to like him, let alone emulate him. Over the course of the film we see Brandon's lifestyle slowly overtaking the veil of ignorance that surrounds it. He goes from seeming in control to pure, visceral desperation until an emotional break pulls him back from the edge.

Brandon's addiction is characterised by what Sigmund Freud called a "death drive" - commonly known as thanatos, after the Greek personification of Death. Put simply, our main character is compelled to engage in behaviour which is risky, shameful and ultimately self-destructive. Brandon is searching for the fleeting or unobtainable thrill that is expressed in sexual ecstasy, and the more compulsive he becomes in his search, the further from his goal he gets. The petit mort or orgasm that the character experiences is a microcosm of his state, a fleeting glimpse of his ultimate fate, something which is enticing yet terrifying, preventable yet inevitable.

Shame spends a lot of its running time showing how distant Brandon is from the people around him. His desire for sexual satisfaction is matched by an inability or unwillingness to be intimate: he has few friends, doesn't return his sister's calls, and cuts straight to the chase when he and his boss go out on the pull. While the latter makes a fool of himself with bad dancing and corny chat-up lines, Brandon bides his time and eventually gets what he wants - or at least, what he wants right then.

This idea is reinforced by the conversation in the restaurant between Brandon and Mariane. Having arrived late and ordered their food, the two enter into a discussion about marriage, and Mariane spots an elderly couple on the other side of the restaurant, sitting silently. She postulates that they are not talking because they know each other so well that there is no need to say anything; Brandon retorts that they are bored and have simply run out of things to say. It's a lovely microcosm of Brandon's character, displaying his contempt for connection thinly disguised by wit and charm.

The film also touches on the way that the internet has changed sexual relationships. It takes the basic thesis of The Social Network (that online networking has made us more atomistic) and advances the idea that the instant gratification of online porn has diminished the emphasis we place on marriage and monogamy. Brandon can easily get aroused when the outcome is certain, whether online or in the gay club, but when he is asked to be intimate and personable in the film's only sexy scene, he can only go so far before his insecurities are exposed. The film doesn't argue that the internet is a probable cause for Brandon's afflictions, but it certainly isn't helping matters.

 

The film is held together by the stunning performance of Michael Fassbender, who first came to attention through his previous work with McQueen in Hunger. Fassbender is deeply charismatic but has a real sadness to him: his deep blue eyes slowly wander in every conversation, searching desperately for acceptance while trying to keep up a façade. He gets some good support from Carey Mulligan, who delivers despite having less to work with than she did in Drive. Her slow rendition of 'New York, New York', which moves Brandon to tears, is quite remarkable.

If you wanted a sound-byte to encapsulate Shame, you might say that it does for sex addiction what Requiem for a Dream did for drug addiction, depicting a destructive force in graphic detail. But this analogy would be misplaced, since McQueen is interested in self-annihilation while Darren Aronofsky also concentrates on existential despair. It also illuminates the problem with Shame, namely that for all its graphic content, it doesn't go quite far enough.

In Requiem for a Dream, the experience was completely unhinged: the rapid editing, grim storyline and the lengths to which the characters were degraded made it painful to sit through, for all the right reasons. We genuinely got the sense of being in the same spiral as the characters, not knowing where we would end up and coming out feeling depressed but lucky to be alive. Shame has moments where it feels like this, but it also feels like a rigged experiment, perhaps reflecting McQueen's background in visual art. Despite an ambiguous ending and the shock of Sissie's fate, it still feels a little too choreographed or predetermined to completely knock us for six. 

Shame is a bold and intriguing second effort from McQueen with a stunning central performance by Fassbender. It offers audiences a lot to chew on without coming across as a message movie, keeping us focussed on the disintegration of the characters. It is slightly compromised by its sense of distance, and it lacks the level of terrifying desperation offered by Requiem for a Dream. But it's still highly recommended as a work of great power and emotional intelligence.

Read More