Watch Hunger
- 1997
- 2 Seasons
In the tradition of gritty, exciting, jail dramas like Alcatraz and Prison Break, Hunger features Michael Fassbender and a strong, but unknown ensemble cast who bring to life a vivid but dark period in the history of modern UK and Irish relations. Excerpted directly from the Margaret Thatcher era, Hunger chronicles the second of two hunger strikes and a no-wash protest staged by Bobby Sands, the then-Provisional IRA volunteer and MP, who in concert with his IRA comrades determined to regain previously revoked political status for their Republican constituency.
Shot in a predominantly wide angle in shades of bluish gray, and with furious confrontation scenes between prisoners and guards interspersed with long scenes of melancholy, meditation, and one-on-one dialogue, Hunger dramatizes as it reveals the average day in the life of an IRA prisoner housed in Her Majesty's Maze Prison circa 1970, in northern Ireland.
Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, the real-life figure who led the no-wash protest and hunger strike, himself perishing after several months of starvation and deterioration. He was subsequently elected to the United Kingdom Parliament as Fermanagh and South Tyrone MP, though his Republican party was denied political status.
Steve McQueen, the much lauded and very young director of Hunger, spares no details when revealing the guts and blood of life inside HM Maze Prison. Inmates engaged in their no-wash protest are shown collecting old food which they turn into paste for creating urine funnels, and funneling urine into the prison hallways. We see them defecating in their own cells and smearing feces all over their cell walls. We see them visiting with family members with whom they exchange contraband, shoving foreign objects into their orifices.
Fassbender, who fasted for the role, is shown wasting away, his body riddled with sores that ooze puss. Confrontations between prisoners and guards are filmed in a mixture of steady and shifting camera angles, heightening the viewer's tension. At one point an actual recording of Margaret Thatcher is heard in the background, her tone icy and resolute, a fitting undertone to this movie's profound and inspiring but tragic, historically accurate denouement.