No Sex Please, we're Addicts

It is a good thing that McQueen's visual sense is viscerally watchable, even when his set is a greyly minimal marketing agency office, or Fassbender's refrigerator of a high-spec apartment. It's also a very good thing that Fassbender is electrifying, even (or especially) in the most mundane elements of his compulsive masturbation.

The film needs both these elements quite badly, as it doesn't make a case for the central male character at all. He has a very highly paid job in what appears to be advertising, but never does anything remotely convincing. He has a colossal quantity of porn stashed on his PC at work, and seems surprised when he's caught. He compulsively watches porn on his laptop at home, and is an enthusiastic and loyal customer of many local prostitutes, but is introduced to us as a man with a supernaturally powerful sexual magnetism for attractive women. Toward the end of the film, we understand he is in a state of horrifying sexual need, but are expected to believe he would visit a gay club for a blow-job. Libidinally he's simply not believable, and the cliff-hanger of an is-he-redeemed-or-not finale, doesn't seem like the question the audience has been asked throughout.

Having said that, the genuinely disturbing expression on his face as he fucks the final in a sequences of prostitutes near the end of the film, like an athlete who's destroyed his metabolism with steroids just to keep competing, and is realising he's left it far too late to stop, is worth the psychological jigsaw-mix -up of his character.