My Review Of "Hunger"

Hunger is a very powerful film about inmates of an Irish political prison. This is more an art film than the traditional film made for entertainment. I find it difficult for someone to enjoy watching this film, though I could totally understand liking it and learning from it. Hunger has very strong performances that really don’t use or even require lots of dialogue to push their emotions. Most of the story is told with a visual approach. That being said, Hunger uses impeccable technique in terms of storytelling as well as the filmmaking process. My absolute favorite scene in this film was a split screen shot that showed the Irish inmates being savagely beaten by British police, while on the other side one of the British officers was in a separate room with his helmet in his hand because he was crying. In the beginning of the film there are some absolutely gorgeous shots of the prison warden standing outside in the snow smoking a cigarette. In many films today you don’t see that sort of detail given to such a simple scene. Hunger had many scenes of brutal horror that would take someone with a good tolerance to stomach. One particularly horrid scene is when the prisoners are being viciously beaten while they are naked, and then the prison warden proceeds to cut off their hair with a large pair of scissors. They are given uniforms to wear but they resist, and eventually this leads to a hunger strike, with many scenes of brutal torture and rebellion in between. There is a very long dialogue scene that is one shot the entire time, this scene may be boring to some as we are used to so much movement and visual stimuli, but none the less it is extremely impressive. I would recommend Hunger to fans of art films and the Criterion Collection DVD series.