Film Reviews

Hunger

• Rating:
• Director: Steve McQueen
• Starring: Liam Cunningham
• Details: UK/Ireland / 96mins (15A).

Despite chronicling Bobby Sands's 66-day hunger strike in The Maze Prison, 1981, because of the British government's refusal to recognise IRA inmates as political prisoners, debutant Steve McQueen opts instead for delaying the introduction of his 'hero' until the last possible moment. In an opening ten-minute sequence that's bereft of dialogue, we see morose prison guard Lohan (Graham) soothe his aching hands, complete with scabby knuckles, in warm water. Lohan then goes about his morning routine - checking under his car for bombs - before heading off to work. McQueen then leaves Lohan, concentrating on the induction of a random prisoner (Brian Milligan), who refuses to wear the prison's uniform on the grounds that he is a political prisoner and not a criminal. After spending time introducing various characters and the harsh world they inhabit inside The Maze, McQueen returns to Lohan and how he gets those bloody knuckles: refusing to be washed, the IRA prisoners have to be beaten into the baths. It's here, too, that we first meet Bobby Sands (Fassbender, who must be a shoe-in for an nomination come Oscar time), the defacto IRA leader in the H Block.

It's all conceived with the bare minimum of dialogue - that is until Hunger's centrepiece: a fifteen minute-or-so scene involving Fassbender's Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham's priest, playing Devil's Advocate to Sands's proposed suicide. The scene is almost one shot, and the dialogue has to be the very best to sustain it. It is, as Cunningham and Fassbender shoot the breeze before getting down to politics, morality and mortality in a beautifully written scene. What follows is all Sands, as he embarks on that 66-day nil by mouth, and McQueen doesn't allow the viewer anywhere to hide from the horror with Fassbender's emaciation and skin welts in constant close up. Hunger, despite the horror the prisoners are put through, isn't a one-sided treatise, either: McQueen leaves us in no doubt that Lohan hates his job, lingering on a distressed guard long enough for him to break down and shows a UDA supporter carrying a weak Sands to his cell like a baby. There isn't much of a story going on here, but that doesn't stop it packing an emotional punch.

Review by Gavin Burke