Steve McQueen directs a prison movie far from escapist. By DAVID LEVINSON.

LENDING a savage intimacy to the spirit of Bobby Sands – the IRA radical who spearheaded the Irish prison-strikes of 1981 – Hunger is a no-holds-barred immersion in human suffering. Directed by Steve McQueen, and winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the film confines itself to the Maze prison in County Down, where Sands (Michael Fassbender) is being held for the possession of firearms; upon greeting a newly-appointed cellmate, he bitterly reveals that he’s been sentenced to 12 years imprisonment. But any recourse to the comfort of time (no matter how slight) is cut short by the permanence of the two men’s surroundings – a sterile, baby-yellow lockup, the walls of which have been smeared in shit. Even the panacea of religion offers no comfort, as seen during a scene where Sands meets with a visiting priest (played by Liam Cunningham), who engages him in a theological debate over the merits of a proposed hunger-strike; curtly rejecting the priest’s qualms, Sands confirms that McQueen’s aim – beyond political and religious descant – is to restore to the abstract tide of history a physical sense of suffering. Thus, as openly fetishistic as any Cremaster movie, Hunger exploits the body as a medium: Prisoners spill urine into the hallway in protest, watching as lone puddles magnetically seep together; men outfitted in riot gear violently bear down on naked flesh; food, abandoned for days, writhes with maggots.

In his fearless commitment to the verité of prison life, McQueen offers a study of individual lives shorn away by institutional role-playing, observing as the gap between prisoners and guards repeatedly dissolves into ceremonial violence. Unlike van Sant though, whose cutting between discrete viewpoints borders on ambiant portraiture, McQueen uses the approach to glib ends: The opening segment, for instance, dedicated to the anal morning routine of a prison guard, seems to exist only to provide a banal contrast to his later-revealed monstrosity. Meanwhile, on the Republican side-of-the-fence, there’s the blunt cut from a radio excerpt – voicing the refusal of the government to grant exceptional status to political prisoners – to a prisoner demanding he be allowed to wear his own clothing. McQueen may reason that the veracity of his images trump story concerns, but while seemingly minor in the scale of things, these faults decenter the movie; as directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien and José Luis Guerín have proved thus far, experimental narratives are a delicate balancing act – one that McQueen feels too dual-minded to pull off.