Unlike addictions to drugs, alcohol and gambling, sex addiction has long sat beside ‘manflu’ as one of those laughable ailments we rarely recognise as a serious medical condition. Shame dispels such attitudes, the film a tragic portrait of a life plagued by sexual obsession.

Rare moments of comic release and spatterings of warm golden hues – around his sister as she sings at a show, and in the film’s final orgiastic montage - provide respite from the blues, whilst serving further to reinforce the captivating melancholy that pervades the film.

Long close-ups of Fassbender’s solemn face against a desolate patchwork of blues, whites and greys intensify the despondent tone of McQueen’s minimalist yet stunning mise-en-scene.

Shame is driven less by narrative than by the exposition of a man’s incapacity for personal relationships beyond sex. Fassbender’s inability to connect with the women in his life – anonymous sexual partners, the fellow employee he dates, his equally troubled sister – finds an ingenious echo in our own inability to connect with our protagonist.

Upon leaving the cinema, it is hard to fully understand our own detachment. We aware of the striking absence of details about his past, his parents and his job, yet our disconnection lies more in the very cause of his pain, the wall between him and anyone who seeks to understand him. McQueen further throws us into the shoes of the protagonist with his artistic usage of the medium, often verging on the voyeuristic. We are treated to frequent close-ups of eyes, lips and thighs as though seen through Fassbender’s predatorial gaze.

As integral to the film as its use of colour is its richly symbolic soundtrack. A series of jazz standards express the pain and complexity of love and loneliness, while slow-moving, ordered renditions of Bach heighten the pathos of many emotive scenes.

Sombre and often chilling, Shame still delights the viewer with its sensational camerawork, tense and erotic sex scenes and gripping, unique insight into the reality of sex addiction. Not one to be missed.