At the 2008 New York Film Festival, filmmaker Steve McQueen insisted that Hunger is “not about left and right [because] I can identify with both sides.” Movies in general present violence as “sexy,” but his aim has been “violence with resonance.” He hopes to  give a human spin to the television face and fast-day number when he was eleven and Bobby Sands twenty-seven. Also, because Ireland is currently thriving, he doesn’t “want to follow up on that,” but to offer an inside view on our dilemma with the politics of torture, suicide martyrdom, and the freedom fighter-terrorist divide.

“One of the most painful periods in British history,” added producer Robin Gutch about the Troubles of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. That term, applied to the years surrounding World War I, became baroque as sands and alliances shifted and blood flowed. Indicating stubbornness in all camps, and also divided sympathies, the film wisely concentrates on prisoners and officials in Belfast’s new Maze Prison.

Shot in Ulster with homegrown co-writer (Enda Walsh), cast and crew, the ninety-six minutes is a triptych, two comparatively speech-free parts -- “originally I didn’t want to have any dialogue at all”-- bookending an extraordinary twenty-minutes-plus debate about principles between provisional IRA prisoner Sands (Michael Fassbender) and pragmatic priest Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), in which the die is cast.

That the outcome is thus fixed, even for those unfamiliar with the historical case, is no drawback. Visually, and as tactilely as film can, the framing sections convey the lives -- and deaths -- of H.M.P. Maze inmates and officers through their own eyes.

With Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) just beginning a six-year sentence for terrorism, one experiences the touch and sight of maggots and the stench of urine spilled into corridors and excrement smeared like abstract art onto walls. In this block of striking IRA prisoners, twelve-year cellmate Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon) demonstrates the smuggling of information to, and of items like a wireless from, patted-down visitors. Rejecting common criminal status, the strikers refuse uniforms or clothing, baths, shaves and haircuts. Garnered from interviews, specific incidents are combined and compressed, but the routine beatings, forced body searches, baths and humiliations are quite enough for even strong stomachs.

Woven in from the other side of the fence is husband and son Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), like Lady Macbeth unable to wash blood from his hands, emotionally drained to an automaton but not blown up (as one expects) by the turn of an ignition key.

Police officer Lohan and a tearful riot cop, occasionally visiting wives, babies and parents and, later, a wordless mournful prison hospital orderly (B.J. Hogg), give a roundness to necessarily simplified complexity, a depth lacking in romanticized works like the 1920s Troubles-set The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

To intense single-source backlighting, the centerpiece is the talk between leader Sands (elected to Parliament while incarcerated) and his older priest-friend. Starting off with small talk and shared cigarettes, they feint and spar and then get down to brass tacks, the man of the cloth pleading for life and a resigned working within the undesirable but unassailable system, while the younger man determines to lay down life in a renewed uncompromising hunger strike. The impasse concludes with a monologue on Sands and fellow Belfast youngsters’ long-ago trip to compete at a cross-country meet in Cork, in the Republic, and of the (fictional) incident of a dying foal.

Devil’s advocate or voice of reason, Fr. Dom is silent and, at Bobby’s joked serious request, leaves the packet of fags. In dream vision during the graphic dénouement, the twelve-year-old Bobby (Ciaran Flynn) reappears, tying in the cross-country runner who will not give up.

Comparing opening prison exposition, before the central conversation, to floating downstream on your back taking in orientational bankside scenery, McQueen hopes that the prisoner-priest discussion of individual freedom and responsibility causes the audience to engage and “receive information in a more thinking light.” Decisions about morality in compromised situations where one-hundred-percent right or wrong is debatable, have at least been weighed by now. This point passed, this particular film conclusion is foregone. The resonance, however, continues, nowhere more essential than for today’s world. 

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)