It’s in the spaces between the sex

– which although frequent, is still not as often as he’d like.

When he meets Marianne (Nicole Beharie), he feels a real emotional and intellectual attraction.

Despite its array of bodies, appendages and implicit bodily fluids, Shame is really about interiority. The irony is that while Brandon is incapable of letting anyone into his life, let alone his heart or mind, he is equally inaccessible to the film and its audience.

It’s not that Brandon doesn’t want to love. He simply doesn’t know how. It’s almost like he can’t remember. Or perhaps he can, but the pain is too great.

That said, I should point out the film doesn’t make moral judgements about sex, or reduce sex and love to the simple binaries of, say, American elections.

For Brandon’s sister (Carey Mulligan), who has recently moved in with him, love comes too easily and she gives her heart away as quickly as his brother dispenses with his body.

But as the film progresses, it becomes apparent that Sissy’s desperate need to reach out is precisely the thing that prevents Brandon from reaching out beyond the perimeter of his own body.

What that thing is exactly the film never tells us, and Shame is in many ways a film about a shared history to which we are not privy.

It is also a deeply layered film about the social construction of sexuality, morality and guilt.

That it all works so well as a film is testimony to a remarkable grasp of pacing and immaculately controlled direction from Steve Mcqueen.

But it couldn’t have happened without Fassbender. Seldom has a lack of emotion been revealed with such depth. We get a sense of a man who cannot see into himself, even as he can see the workings of the world with a dismissive ease.

His classically beautiful face is a broken cipher filled with conflicting streams of sadness and desire gradually merging. That’s a description of his orgasm in Shame as he’s having sex with two women. It’s the film’s money shot, and we see only his face.

So this much-heralded erotic smut-fest is actually a slow, almost painfully meditative work of art. And when I say that, I’m not being hyperbolic.

Shame is unashamedly cinema as fine art – Mcqueen first made his name as a visual artist – and it’s fine art way before it’s entertainment.

Which doesn’t mean the film doesn’t play like a thriller or remain gripping for all 101 minutes. Fine art can do that regardless of whether it’s still or moving. But those expecting a more brutal variation on Californication will be utterly disappointed. Those expecting a beautifully stylised variation on The Outsider might be slightly less so.