FILM

UK 2011 101 mins Dir: Steve McQueen Starring: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale

The familiar lengthy tracking shots are present and correct, and there's another extraordinary performance from Michael Fassbender, but artist-turned-director Steve McQueen's follow-up to 'Hunger' is a less rigidly formal affair. Much of the film's advance publicity has hinged on the headline-grabbing sex addiction theme and full-frontal nudity. But while those with an interest in such matters will be delighted to learn that Mr. Fassbender has nothing to be, um, ashamed of in the trouser region, this is not another of those sexually explicit cause celebres that keep the Daily Mail in foaming material.

There's more than a hint of American Psycho's Partick Bateman about cold-eyed, emotionally disengaged, elegantly groomed Brandon (Fassbender), who lives in a minimalist Manhattan apartment and is apparently pretty good at doing something corporate in an anonymous New York office block. Like Bateman, Brandon is a predator. But that's where the similarity ends. Brandon's no fantasy psychopath but a compulsive shagger. When he's not eyeing up women wolfishly on the subway, he's paying for hookers. If living, breathing sexual partners aren't available, he idly soaks up internet porn and even nips into an office toilet cubicle for a crafty wank. He's also devastatingly skilled at seduction. When his sleazy, married boss David (Dale) makes a clumsy attempt to pick up a woman in a bar, Brandon bides his time, discreetly closing the deal with an alfresco legover. Enter his needy, estranged, self-harming nightclub singer sister Sissy (Mulligan), who's as desperate for love as he is for sex and disrupts his carefully compartmentalised life with an unwelcome visit.

Beyond the broadest of hints ("We're not bad people," wails Sissy, "We just come from a bad place.") McQueen and screenwriter Abi Morgan opt not to disclose anything about the siblings' background, leaving us guessing as to what might have led them to become so damaged. But Sissy's arrival succeeds in igniting mutual crises as she takes up with sleazy David, while Brandon fails spectacularly at the conventional dating thing, eventually seeking some kind of sexual obliteration in a threesome.

These are difficult people to love, or even to like, though the performances are terrific. Fassbender's grabbing all the attention, but Mulligan enjoys another of her signature crying jags and croons the saddest ever version of 'New York New York', almost moving her brother to something in the vicinity of emotion. (Robin Askew)

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Opens: January 13

Copyright Robin Askew 2012