By the time Bobby Sands died in April 1981, more than 2,000 people had perished as a direct result of the conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the British occupational forces. Many of the convicted IRA fighters were housed in Belfast’s infamous Maze Prison where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steadfastly refused to grant them the status of political prisoners; they were instead regarded as common criminals. In March of that year, IRA member Bobby Sands, who only weeks earlier had been elected to Parliament, began a hunger strike in protest. Sixty-six days later he died a cadaverous, shrunken shell of a man. Nine more men followed his example until the British government finally caved.

Hunger, the debut film from renowned British video installation artist Steve McQueen, is a lacerating portrait of martyrdom, told without bias or predisposition. McQueen’s devotion is not to partisanship or even principle, but to the intensely visceral visual poetry captured by his camera, action and emotion stripped utterly bare so that all that remains is a rabid, unflinching concentration on the image itself. The result is one of the most brutal, demoralizing things you’re ever likely to see. McQueen’s lack of filmmaking experience actually makes Hunger a better, more powerful film. Surely a more accomplished director who “knew better” would never have had the guts to channel Hieronymus Bosch for this agonizing, punishing, but ultimately awe-inspiring parade of horrors.

Structurally, Hunger is divided into three parts. The transitions between the sections chart a stream-of-consciousness course; when one tributary ends abruptly, we pick up with another. The first section opens with the intimate routines of a man who is obviously dying inside. His name is Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), a prison guard at the Maze Prison who lives his life in a constant state of apprehension. After watching him get ready in the morning — washing his hands repeatedly as if he is Pontius Pilate trying to cleanse the sin from his skin — we see him thoroughly inspect his car for explosives before leaving for work. Mere minutes into the film, the tension is already palpable. For nearly 10 dialogue-less minutes, we follow Raymond around the Maze. We’re not sure what is hollowing him out inside more: the constant trepidation that someone is out to get him or the nature of his work, sadistically manhandling the IRA prisoners in H-block. We never find out. In one of the few scenes to take place outside the prison, an assassin blows Raymond’s brains all over his mother’s face, moments before he tumbles into her lap like a gore-splattered pieta.

The second section concentrates on Davey Gillen (Brian Milligen), a new prisoner. We don’t know what crime Davey has committed. We don’t know what crimes any of the men have committed. But we watch, with a painstaking attention to the procedural detail, as he is brought in, strip searched and tossed into a literal shit hole. His cellmate, a naked, long-haired character straight out of the early chapters of Dumas’ “Count of Monte Cristo,” has decorated every square inch of his cell with his own excrement. When treated like animals, the prisoners begin living like animals. But Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon) knows how to survive, knows how to smuggle messages written on cigarette paper or pages of scripture via bodily orifices, knows that something as simple as watching a fly can stave off insanity, and knows that his feces-smeared cell and the urine he and his fellow prisoners collect and pour into the hallway each night disgusts and provokes the guards (a reaction we share). We see things we should never see because they are forced to do things no human being should ever be forced to do. The guards of course respond with brutal violence. Much of the time, Hunger feels like a narrative of routines. This then is the routine of the Maze, which, like its name, has trapped both guards and prisoners alike in an inescapable pattern of inhumanity.

The hunger strike is born from this “dirty protest,” leading into the final section of the film in which Bobby Sands is finally introduced. Bookend by violence and cruelty is the eye of the storm, an astonishing, nearly 20-minute, single take conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a tough, sympathetic Roman Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham). This is the point at which the words of McQueen’s playwrite, co-author Enda Walsh, come to the fore. Up to this point, much of the film has been nearly wordless, as if the characters communicate telepathically. While the smoke from the men’s cigarettes — the only thing moving in the frozen frame — coils about their heads, the priest tries in vain to steer Bobby away from his suicide mission. What begins as a discussion on the efficacy of the hunger strike and the futility of martyrdom becomes a reminiscing on youth, freedom and steadfastness to one’s conscience. The priest-prisoner dialogue is one of the most powerful ever set to film. It is, in essence, Sand’s final confession and his last rights. He will leave this priest and begin his hunger strike using the only weapon at his disposal — his own body.

Fassbender, best known as the muscular, golden-locked Stelios in Zach Snyder’s violence porn epic 300, fasted for two months, under intense medical supervision, to become the Auschwitz-inspired skeletal cadaver we see at the end of Hunger. The sequence of his physical deterioration is both grotesque and riveting. We don’t simple watch Bobby Sands die; we are told how it happens. Doctors describe the gastrointestinal ulcers that cover his body and the rotting of his malnourished vital organs. As flashbacks illuminate Bobby’s formative years, he becomes an almost Christ-like icon, made possible by the intentional lack of character development. (Characters are introduced to us not so we can learn about them, but so they can teach us about the world they inhabit.) This is the passion of Bobby Sands. And like Christ, who eschewed the satanic tempter in the desert, there, by Bobby’s bedside at all times, is an unmolested tray of food.

Hunger, which won the prize for best first feature at Cannes last year, is more like a documentary than a narrative. That a film this masterful is the product of a first-time filmmaker is astonishing. McQueen’s instincts for how to structure the film, where to place his camera and for how long are spectacular. Not many artists leap from the gallery to the theater with such ease. But like Julian Schnabel (the painter who directed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), McQueen has created a work of art that stands as a textbook example of pure visual storytelling. Utilizing a meandering, protracted pace, long-held shots that seem to go on for minutes (a guard cleans an elongated, urine-soaked hallway in real time), and an impressionist style unafraid to linger on tiny intimacies, McQueen frontloads more blistering imagery into his first feature-length film than many filmmakers manage in an entire career. The harrowing, contemplative Hunger is, without question, one of the gutsiest, most self-assured initial films ever made.

Some watching the film will be frustrated that McQueen doesn’t take sides and assert some sort of moral judgment. But McQueen lets the repellant depravity onscreen, stripped of any sort of tragic grandeur, speak for itself; there is no need for sensationalizing. Still, it isn’t hard to extrapolate meaning from the narrative, even if it isn’t intentional. The parallels between the suffering of the IRA prisoners in 1981 and the subsequent atrocities of those in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay are unavoidable. History is doomed to repeat itself. Valor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and whether Bobby Sands was a terrorist or a hero, his actions altered the course of a government. Whatever your determination, you cannot come to the end of Hunger without recognizing that inflexible fanaticism was a cancer that destroyed both the promise and lives of men on both sides of the conflict.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.