Running time: 129 minutes
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, Larry Cowan, Rory Mullen
Rating 9 out of 10
Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize-winning British artist previously best-known for his experimental approach to film, such as his 1997 recreation of the famous Buster Keaton house-falling sequence. Hunger, his debut feature, propels him immediately into a new sphere and announces him as a vital force in world cinema.
In recreating the events leading up to and including the notorious hunger strikes at Northern Ireland's Maze Prison in 1981, McQueen has made one of the year's most controversial films: it is a brutally violent and uncomfortable cinematic experience but one which is also startling and brilliant.
Ignore what certain aspects of the media will inevitably latch on to: Mcqueen (and co-writer Enda Walsh) are neither pandering to the cause of the terrorists nor showing them in any sympathetic light. The film is particular about the detail it gives to both sides of the story: following anonymous prison officers as they try to avoid being assassinated on Civvy Street while using vicious force - necessary in their view - to subjugate their charges.
The prisoners are shown as simply refusing to comply with any of the rules, creating almost inhuman living conditions by spreading their faeces on the walls of their maggot-infested cells and a constant friction with the guards which frequently erupted into graphically depicted violence. Many of the scenes are very hard to digest.
Only midway through does the script begin to focus on Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who led the hunger strikers and whose protests ended in several deaths and some concessions towards the prisoners' welfare. A 22-minute scene between Sands and a Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham), shot entirely without cuts for 17 of its minutes, is representative of the film as a whole: unexpected, riveting and unforgettable.
Paul Hurley
In recreating the events leading up to and including the notorious hunger strikes at Northern Ireland's Maze Prison in 1981, McQueen has made one of the year's most controversial films: it is a brutally violent and uncomfortable cinematic experience but one which is also startling and brilliant.
Ignore what certain aspects of the media will inevitably latch on to: Mcqueen (and co-writer Enda Walsh) are neither pandering to the cause of the terrorists nor showing them in any sympathetic light. The film is particular about the detail it gives to both sides of the story: following anonymous prison officers as they try to avoid being assassinated on Civvy Street while using vicious force - necessary in their view - to subjugate their charges.
The prisoners are shown as simply refusing to comply with any of the rules, creating almost inhuman living conditions by spreading their faeces on the walls of their maggot-infested cells and a constant friction with the guards which frequently erupted into graphically depicted violence. Many of the scenes are very hard to digest.
Only midway through does the script begin to focus on Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who led the hunger strikers and whose protests ended in several deaths and some concessions towards the prisoners' welfare. A 22-minute scene between Sands and a Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham), shot entirely without cuts for 17 of its minutes, is representative of the film as a whole: unexpected, riveting and unforgettable.
Paul Hurley
