Nothing about ""Hunger"" is easy to watch. The move is unforgiving, brutal and frustrating. It contains very little dialogue, and many scenes will make you want to avert your eyes. But don't look away. It's worth it.
The film, written and directed by feature film newcomer Steve McQueen (no relation to that Steve McQueen) and based on a true story, takes you to Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, 1981, where Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) leads a hunger strike that leaves him withered and dead at the age of 27.
The movie opens with a prison guard (excellently played by Stuart Graham) washing his bruised knuckles, kissing his wife goodbye, checking under his car for a bomb and driving to work. From there, it's—forgive the pun—take no prisoners. The men in jail have nothing left to protest with other than their bodies, and they do so in graphic ways—smearing shit on the walls, funneling piss out of their cells to flood the halls and even living naked. The guards, on the other hand, attempt to break the resisting bodies through regular beatings (hence the bruised knuckles).
Surprisingly, there are no completely bad guys.
Sands and the rest of the prisoners are not glorified, as some reviewers have claimed, nor are the prison guards demonized. The look on Graham's face as he stands guard says it all, as does the emotion of the other prison guard, who ducks away from one prisoner-abuse session to quietly cry to himself.
For most of the movie, in fact, words are not needed. The way McQueen works the camera—focusing on crumbs falling on a man's lap, or on a fly walking across a windowpane, for example—tells the story beautifully.
When dialogue does finally enter the picture, it is in the form of a nearly ten-minute debate between Sands and a priest, Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), that juggles subjects such as politics and humanity superbly. Other than that, the movie is simply a collection of haunting images, like moving paintings.
For a movie about political prisoners, ""Hunger"" is surprisingly un-political. The film focuses completely on what makes us human and why humans do what they do to each other. It will disgust you and move you, and it deserves to be listed among the best films of 2008.
Grade: AB
