Hunger
Directed by Steve McQueen
- drama
- history
The story
The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike during The Troubles in which Irish Republican prisoners tried to win political status.
What it’s like
Cold, almost clinical long takes define Hunger: static shots of grey cell walls, scuffed concrete corridors and a body slowly wasting under flat fluorescent light, with a long, wordless sequence of a prisoner's cell being scrubbed and smeared with excrement that stays unbroken for minutes. The palette is bleached and washed out, the sound design mostly the hum of keys, boots, distant shouting and breath, with near-silence doing most of the work. Its vibe is bleak, austere and punishing, the kind of film you sit through rather than settle into, best suited to a focused evening rather than a casual watch. Pacing is deliberate and slow, with long stretches of stillness broken by sudden, brutal eruptions of violence, including a prolonged, unflinching beating by guards and a late, lengthy dialogue scene between a priest and a prisoner that plays like a chamber piece. The emotional register is grim and stoical, and the arc follows a man hardening his body and will into a political act, with the people around him shifting from adversaries to witnesses. Intensity is high: graphic brutality, bloody injuries, nudity and bodily degradation, and a sustained depiction of starvation that is harrowing rather than gory. It suits viewers drawn to uncompromising historical drama and austere arthouse filmmaking, not anyone seeking something gentle.
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