HUNGER  (MA)
Starring Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham
Directed by Steve McQueen

Paradoxically, it is McQueen’s aesthetic that makes this gruellingly magnificent horror show so difficult to digest – it would be easier to watch if it wasn’t so good. Belfast’s Maze Prison, circa 1981. Claims for political status has led to protests which London’s Iron Lady will not tolerate. Prisoners are physically abused in graphic, unblinking detail, and forced into squalid, freezing cells smeared (albeit artfully) with faeces. Celebrity prisoner Bobby Sands decides to renew a failed hunger strike. McQueen’s largely dialogue free sound-mix concentrates attention: Thatcher’s disembodied, nerve-jangling voice hangs over scenes like a spectre. Then the centrepiece – a contrasting, 22-minute, one-shot scene in which Sands debates the strike like there’s no tomorrow. Which there may not be. But is it suicide, or martyrdom? And can it ever be justified? Big questions that echo all the way to Abu Ghraib and beyond. McQueen doesn’t flinch in portraying the cold-blooded murder of a warden. Or the smallest detail of Sands self-imposed emaciation. Lingering on a melting snowflake or the contents of a toilet bowl defines the richness of Hunger. It is a film with few precedents and demands viewing for this reason alone. However it is not a film for everyone – and so exhausting is the experience, one that requires the sturdiest of stomachs.

- Colin Fraser