Hunger

“Hunger” is marked by a series of strange and unsettling sequences shot over what feels like painful amounts of time. In one such scene, the camera rests for a good two minutes on a prison inmate as he watches a fly crawl across his arm. In lesser hands these moments could be rendered meaningless and dull, but McQueen’s film instead uses this minimalist aesthetic to transcend a simple set of plot details. In its depiction of real-life events, “Hunger” falls in an innovative category between straightforward documentary and dramatized historical epic. Much of the movie resembles visual art rather than film, eschewing dialogue and reportage for a haunting, gruesome, and powerful display of images.

Most of the British-born McQueen’s work has been experimental. Famous for his silent films and small gallery projections, he dropped out of New York University’s Tisch School of Arts because he felt the teaching restricted his experimental aspirations. Now it seems McQueen has found success in this artistic attempt at relaying the famed story of the Irish Republican Army’s hunger strike in the early 1980s.

“Hunger” follows the group of prisoners at Ireland’s Her Majesty’s Prison Maze that demanded basic human rights in jail—such as the freedom to wear their own clothes, receive one visit a week from a family member, and organize recreational activities amongst themselves. Though the inmates first attempted a “no wash” strike, their demands were not met until Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender, “Band of Brothers”) led a hunger strike in 1981, ending successfully seven months later after the deaths of 10 men.

The film has three major movements: scenes of the prisoners’ daily lives in the Maze, a long conversation between Sands and a priest, and the slow deterioration of Sands’ body. Within these three parts, the simplicity of the plot gains striking power from the horrifying images onscreen.

Without warning, McQueen immediately throws the viewer into the depths of the prisoner’s “no wash” protest, portraying unwashed, unshaven men smearing their excrement on the walls of their cells. Lengthy, uneventful scenes evoke the empty hours the prisoners experience in jail—time wasted away in their disgusting dungeons of protest. McQueen’s attention to detail creates an arresting immediacy. He does not toy with the viewer’s emotions; rather he demands that the audience be repulsed, distressed, and deeply moved.

After these visceral shocks, McQueen moves in the film’s second part to a lengthy conversation between Sands and his longtime friend, Father Lohan (Liam Cunningham, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”). Here, as in the rest of the film, McQueen withholds no information from his audience, instead using Lohan to clarify the straightforward events of the plot. Sands’ death is inevitable; there are no plot twists or surprises in the film. In a startlingly long and still scene, Lohan interrogates Sands, questioning his sanity after years in prison, his appreciation of his own life, and the likelihood that he will go through with starvation before his demands are met. The rest of the scene provides an opportunity for Sands to boldly state his dedication to the protests. “You call it suicide; I call it murder,” he tells his friend, and with this, the film once again embraces wordlessness for its final chapter.

The images in this third movement provide an uncensored and nauseating display of the deterioration of a human body without nourishment. McQueen documents the constant attention given to Sands by the hospital doctors as he refuses all food and gradually surrenders his body. McQueen, much like Sands, has a single and purposeful intention from which he never strays. Refusing to either condemn or glorify the IRA, the director focuses solely on the physicality of the prisoners’ grim undertaking. In this approach, “Hunger” bravely reveals the visceral underbelly of a well-known event in English and Irish history. McQueen illustrates with profound artistry the eerie quiet of a hunger strike and the severe calm with which Sands chooses to die. The result is a brutal and emotional film that seeks not to entertain, but instead to let the corporeal imagery speak for itself.

—Staff writer Noël D. Barlow can be reached at nbarlow@fas.harvard.edu.