Hunger Review

The walls of the cell are covered in human excrement. Layers and layers of it laid on over time until the faecal surface is ruckled and textured like the paint of a Jackson Pollock. In an anonymous artistic flourish, the shit forms a large spiral. Other materials are on the easel: rotting food and its maggot offspring, there to be moulded into sculptures that divert urine out of the cell, streaming into the corridor to join the piss rivers of other prisoners: this is the dirty protest in the H-block of the Maze Prison.

Artist, director and co-writer Steve McQueen is not merely showing us this moment in history, this act of self-debasement, he wants us to inhabit it. "I want to show what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch in the H-block in 1981," states McQueen. The British cultural memory of the IRA hunger strike and Bobby Sands consists of a few iconic images. Memory's eye squints and recalls an aerial shot of the distinctive H-block, a photograph of Bobby Sands' wasted face on a hospital bed and an archive photograph of the hunger striker hirsute and messianic, a hate figure in the British media of the era.

Hunger shows us the reality behind the folk demons, without distilling a message, without reducing the humanity of the situation to a political point either way. Bobby Sands' idealism and Margaret Thatcher's resolution (present in audio recordings of her speeches from the era) are an irresistible force and an immoveable object, each daunting for their superhuman indifference to the sacrifice of the individual.

The film begins with wordless, seized images. Protestors clatter bin lids against the road, an aural assault to prepare us for what is to come. A Maze guard bathes his split knuckles and leaves for work, pausing to check under his car for bombs, then smoking alone and out of focus under falling snow. Here McQueen makes cinema mimic the arrested tableaux of art. Transfixing but distancing. You wonder if this technique will sustain a narrative. But then a new prisoner is brought into the prison, Davey Gillen (Milligan). Gillen refuses to wear the uniform of a convict and so he must strip naked before the diffident authorities. Issued with a blanket, he is shown to his cell and is confronted by the horror of the dirty protest. Cellmate Gerry Campbell (McMahon) inducts him in the vile reality of his new life.