Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen directs an account of the IRA hunger strike and its leader Bobby Sands. A controversial, compelling and visionary approach to a pivotal moment in British and Irish modern history

The walls of the cell are covered in human excrement. Layers and layers of it laid on over time until the faecal surface is ruckled and textured like the paint of a Jackson Pollock. In an anonymous artistic flourish, the shit forms a large spiral. Other materials are on the easel: rotting food and its maggot offspring, there to be moulded into sculptures that divert urine out of the cell, streaming into the corridor to join the piss rivers of other prisoners: this is the dirty protest in the H-block of the Maze Prison.

Artist, director and co-writer Steve McQueen is not merely showing us this moment in history, this act of self-debasement, he wants us to inhabit it. "I want to show what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch in the H-block in 1981," states McQueen. The British cultural memory of the IRA hunger strike and Bobby Sands consists of a few iconic images. Memory‘s eye squints and recalls an aerial shot of the distinctive H-block, a photograph of Bobby Sands‘ wasted face on a hospital bed and an archive photograph of the hunger striker hirsute and messianic, a hate figure in the British media of the era.

Hunger shows us the reality behind the folk demons, without distilling a message, without reducing the humanity of the situation to a political point either way. Bobby Sands‘ idealism and Margaret Thatcher‘s resolution (present in audio recordings of her speeches from the era) are an irresistible force and an immoveable object, each daunting for their superhuman indifference to the sacrifice of the individual.

The film begins with wordless, seized images. Protestors clatter bin lids against the road, an aural assault to prepare us for what is to come. A Maze guard bathes his split knuckles and leaves for work, pausing to check under his car for bombs, then smoking alone and out of focus under falling snow. Here McQueen makes cinema mimic the arrested tableaux of art. Transfixing but distancing. You wonder if this technique will sustain a narrative. But then a new prisoner is brought into the prison, Davey Gillen (Milligan). Gillen refuses to wear the uniform of a convict and so he must strip naked before the diffident authorities. Issued with a blanket, he is shown to his cell and is confronted by the horror of the dirty protest. Cellmate Gerry Campbell (McMahon) inducts him in the vile reality of his new life. The IRA prisoners want to be recognized as political prisoners, apart from ordinary convicts. The British government refuse their demand. The prisoners have already tried one hunger strike, and the dirty protest is the next step. They face the remorseless will of the system. Their only weapon is the body, its orifices allowing them traffic with the outside world; during visiting hours, a radio is passed from vagina to anus.

To stop this illicit trade, riot police arrive to oversee a cavity search. Prisoners are dragged through a gauntlet of flailing batons and splayed over a mirror so that their innermost aspect can be inspected. The man who puts up most resistance to such brutality is Bobby Sands, played by Michael Fassbender. After this savage encounter, he decides to revive the hunger strike with renewed conviction to die if demands are not met.

His priest tries to talk him out of the action. Father Dominic Moran (Cunningham) brings cigarettes, Sands brings idealism. During the 22-minute scene, the two men argue about the strike. The IRA leadership don‘t want another one, the self-inflicted dehumanization damages the cause. What about the other men who will martyr themselves after Sands? They have families. Hasn‘t he thought of the consequences to them? Can‘t Bobby Sands even spare a thought for his own son?

Sands has answers to all these questions. Fassbender‘s performance is phenomenal, recalling the manic intelligence of David Thewlis in Naked, but with purity of belief where Thewlis‘s doomed Johnny had nihilism.

As starvation sets in, Fassbender takes his performance to an extreme of physical mortification. The Christ parallels are there - the way a nurse tends to the hunger striker‘s sores recalls Mary Magdalene ministering to the Saviour on the cross. An equally contentious parallel is to the suicide bomber, the foot soldiers of Islamic Fundamentalism who use the weapon of the body to inflict wounds on as many people as possible, and not merely themselves as Sands did. If the long dialogue between Bobby Sands and his priest tells us anything of contemporary relevance, it is that the system cannot keep backing those who despise it into a corner, the revolutionary will always find a way to keep their faith, regardless of the cost.