FNC’08 Review: Hunger

In Northern Ireland, 1981, IRA member Bobby Sands began a hunger strike to protest the decrepit conditions of Maze Prison where he and other paramilitary prisoners were being held. Steve McQueen’s Hunger chronicles this point of history with a very narrow focus: the prison itself. That Bobby (expertly played by Michael Fassbender) does not appear until the second third of the film allows director McQueen to focus on the conditions of the prison through the eyes of others. This gives a pretext for Bobby’s eventual decision to starve himself. And it is in the details of the conditions where Hunger manages to capture its audience.

Bobby Sands & Father Moran Speak

Hunger is a viciously graphic film set in a tight environment devoid of compassion or reason. Maze is a place where the prisoners have been reduced to animals, spreading their excrement on the walls and sleeping with maggots. It is a place where the guards are only shells of human beings, having left their humanity out in the cold. Maze is a place of choreographed pain, silence and despair made formal through the near lack of dialogue. It’s the invocation of these feelings that makes Hunger succeed as a film. It is less concerned with politics as it is with the conditions its protagonists must endure. And whilst Margaret Thatcher’s infamous line, “There is no such thing as political murder, political violence or political bombing. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence” is voiced, it seems only to place a context on the brutal images on screen.

The guards force-wash the prisoners

One lengthy unbroken scene of dialogue occurs mid-film, between Bobby and a priest, Father Moran. This one conversation seeks to give light to both the love and disdain for Bobby’s actions. In the end, Hunger manages to convey how hellish conditions bring out the most inhuman of actions, be they the wanton violence of the guards or the destructive politicking of the prisoners. It only gives credence to an article written in the Boston Globe at the time that stated: “There are no heroes in the saga of Bobby Sands.” Director Steve McQueen has made a powerful art film that is tough to watch, which is only necessary to understand the lack of humanity in Maze Prison.

The dirty business of cleaning the cells