Hunger is about the brutality of sectarian violence, competing interests, bloodshed, and war. It chooses no sides, but instead puts at the center of its characterization a limpid sensitivity to the human individual, be he an Irish Republican or a devout Ulster Loyalist. The film is shot through with glittering images of the solitude and the sensitivity of a prisoner in whose sun-deprived fingers a fly finds its way, the lonely life of a prison guard whose days consist in checking for car bombs and brutalizing prisoners in between smoke breaks, and the gritty wasting away of a man that has devoted himself to what he believes is right—his own set of rigid ideals stemming, as the film would have it, from his distant boyhood.
Whatever its raw power as a piece of filmmaking and artistry, Hunger is in many ways like a short story whose readers envision for it something longer and more substantial, like a novel, but which might be better off as it is, since changing the length of a story could change its whole dynamic for the worse. Hunger is slight—emotionally burdensome but without much depth and complexity—and yet it is satisfying. And what else can one ask for? Perhaps the posture of a cinematic gratitude would do.
The real strength of Hunger is that it pivots seamlessly between the three up-close portraits of its characters: Raymond Lohan, Davey Gillen, and Bobby Sands. While it does dwell more on Bobby Sands than on the other characters, its intimate attention to these others furnishes the story with texture and depth that justify what I’ve written about its being like a short story. These characters give to Hunger an emotional undercurrent that makes me want more, while being satisfied with what has appeared.
Entrancing but overlong and—to some degree—self-conscious, the centerpiece of the film, the twenty-minute long take of the conversation between Bobby Sands and Father Dominic Moran, is not the highlight of the film but the apex of its stillness and attention. The one slip-up palpable to me is the specious boyhood phantasm of the catatonic Bobby Sands as he lies dying on his hospital bed. This memory is what turns depth into self-conscious depth and so, inevitably, into shallowness striving after effect.
But the overall effect of Hunger is that of a stirring chamber work, a moving short story, and it has so much unforgettable imagery that it is not only re-watchable but impressive: a deep dive into a world as tortured as it is torturing, one in which Bobby Sands has to die trying to obtain recognition. The interesting thing is that he’s not right—but is he wrong to die so uncompromisingly? Additional points to this mature film—it doesn’t even tell us what to think.
