Tweet

Peter Wild finds beauty in this challenging first film from Turner Prize winning artist Steve McQueen.

Installation artist Steve McQueen’s first full length feature, Hunger, is a scalding account of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands’ final few months on Earth. Set almost entirely within the narrow confines of H-Block in the Maze Prison, nine miles outside Belfast, and initially somewhat diffuse – the film opens with a warder checking under his car for a bomb and dousing his bloody knuckles in warm water – it rapidly plunges you into a world that is thankfully past but which is no less bludgeoning and painful for all that. What is evident from the outset, however, is the prism of McQueen himself: this is very much an auteur’s film. Every moment – from the wash of a jet of water on a handcrafted spiral of excrement to the soft pink blush of blood staining water in a sink – is crystallised, held up for appraisal and evaluation, weighted with gravity simply because we are looking at it.

The film’s second half concentrates more fully on Bobby Sands, played with almost zealous intent by Michael Fassbender. Subsequent to a riveting central twenty-minute confession between Sands and his priest (played by Liam Cunningham, previously perhaps best known for his performance in Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley), in which the hunger strike is debated, Hunger takes you on a horror-ride, the physicality of which is as stop-you-in-your-tracks as the figure of Christian Bale in The Mechanic. But here again, even in the midst of scenes that you are forced to watch through split fingers, McQueen wrests beauty from the passing of a man, which is what ultimately Hunger comes down to.

A point is being made here. A point concerning belief and dignity and devotion to a cause, irrespective of the cause itself almost (at no point does the film really engage with what the IRA were at that point up to in Ireland and the UK, for instance). As such, you can pretty much guarantee that no-one will simply leave Hunger shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘Yeah, it was alright’.

This is a movie that will affect you. It is a movie that you will want to talk about and think about. It functions as both artistic object and dynamic cinematic vehicle. This is important cinema.

 

Peter Wild on 30th January 2009
View all 96 of Peter Wild's reviews

A brilliant film. Almost as harrowing a film to watch as Mel Gibson's The Passion, especially the torture scenes. It is great to see a British fim which acknowledges a... more >

A brilliant film. Almost as harrowing a film to watch as Mel Gibson's The Passion, especially the torture scenes. It is great to see a British fim which acknowledges and shows the inhumanity of the Thatcher regime to the Irish. < less