Film
BAFTA Debuts: Hunger
- Director
- Steve McQueen
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 96 mins
Piss, shit, blood…the bodily fluids bill for Hunger must have swallowed half the budget. This assured and innovative feature debut by Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen is visceral in the true sense of the term, plunging the viewer into the Maze Prison of 1981 alongside new inmate Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan). There’s very little dialogue during the film’s first 40 minutes, but the sound design is extraordinary, telling us everything we need to know about the rituals and realities of life as a ‘non-conforming’ prisoner, through which Davey is guided by his older cellmate Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon). You can almost smell the cell where they eat their meals and spread excrement on the walls, often simultaneously. Meanwhile, in a neat suburb, prison officer Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham) performs his daily ritual of checking under the car for explosives and driving to work, his knuckles conspicuously bloodied. With a suitably painterly eye, McQueen observes the pools of piss pouring from under each cell door and merging in the corridor, which contrast starkly with the unflinchingly depicted brutal beatings meted out to naked prisoners in these same corridors after a riot.
Hunger only begins to focus on Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) during its second act, which is remarkably electrifying given that 17 minutes of it are taken up with a single unbroken shot in which Sands jousts verbally with a Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham) who attempts to talk him out of the planned hunger strike. After some initial smalltalk, the conversation takes a heavier turn as it becomes clear that the prisoners will not be moved by the argument that their hunger strike to gain political status is “ridiculous and destructive” because Thatcher will never capitulate. “My life is a real life, not some theological exercise,” spits Sands. So the stage is set for act three, during which Fassbender makes a powerful bid for the Oscar for exceptional skinniness in the line of thespian duty (previous recipients: Christian Bale for The Machinist and Adrien Brody for The Pianist).
McQueen is meticulous in showing how prison officers are also brutalised by conditions in The Maze and suggestions that he makes Sands a heroic figure are pitifully wide of the mark. Anyone who simply wants to learn how to secrete contraband in virtually every bodily orifice will not come away disappointed.
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in the ICO BAFTA Debuts season celebrating the work of British directors who have won the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.
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