Critical response

Shame has received positive reviews. Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 80% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 153 reviews, with an average score of 7.4/10, making the film a "Certified Fresh" on the website's rating system. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 72, based on 38 reviews, which indicates "Generally favorable reviews".

Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times called Shame "a powerful film" and "courageous and truthful", commenting that "this is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice." in a four-star review. Ebert would later name it his second best movie of 2011. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive review, stating: "Driven by a brilliant, ferocious performance by Michael Fassbender, Shame is a real walk on the wild side, a scorching look at a case of sexual addiction that's as all-encompassing as a craving for drugs."

Dan Bullock of The Hollywood News said "Shame is captivating and intensely intimate. McQueen has followed up Hunger with an unflinching and compelling film that explores the depths of addiction and the consequential destruction and demise of the mind and although it is sometimes difficult to watch, you won’t be able to keep your eyes off it.'

Justin Chang of Variety magazine gave the film a positive review, commenting: "A mesmerizing companion piece to his 2008 debut, Hunger, this more approachable but equally uncompromising drama likewise fixes its gaze on the uses and abuses of the human body, as Michael Fassbender again strips himself down, in every way an actor can, for McQueen's rigorous but humane interrogation."

Writing in The New York Times A. O. Scott said, " McQueen wants to show how the intensity of Brandon’s need shuts him off from real intimacy, but this seems to be a foregone conclusion, the result of an elegant experiment that was rigged from the start.

Donald Clarke of the Irish Times called it "the most wholesome film made about unwholesomeness since The Exorcist" noting that "the underlying current of Puritanism is, however, more than a little oppressive".