Hunger' takes a chilling look at food strike by IRA's Bobby Sands

When you know a movie's directed by a conceptual artist dabbling in motion pictures, it's usually helpful to bring along a sharp object.

That way, you can stab yourself in the leg to stay awake during two hours of non-narrative, non-topless, non-zombie, non-car-chase pictorial over-indulgence.

But as movies by dabblers go, "Hunger" stands out. It's by Irish video artist Steve McQueen (yes, that's his name), and it's his visually arresting take on the 1981 hunger strike by IRA leader Bobby Sands, ultimately leading to his death, and the deaths of nine other inmates at Belfast's Maze Prison.

McQueen divides the movie into thirds, starting with a meditative study of the prisoners' grim culture. Inmates use their bodies as instruments of defiance - smearing the walls with excrement, or shaping food into a dam to channel liquid human waste into the hallway for the guards to clean.

Prison guards receive these provocative acts as a form violence, and retaliate in kind, and we witness a contained version of sectarian back-and-forth that existed outside prison walls.

This first section of "Hunger" is mostly wordless, but its studied images are full of movement and suspense - there's a chilling scene of a prison guard going through his morning routine at home, unremarkable except for the minutes he spends examining his car's undercarriage for bombs.

The movie itself explodes in act two, when it's suddenly alive with dialogue - an intense and tightly scripted exchange between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a counseling priest (Liam Cunningham). It's a biting, admirably even-handed moral argument about the true meaning and purpose of Sands' plan to kill himself and others.

Part three returns to visual meditation, as we watch Sands waste away to nothing, or nothingness (Fassbender becomes terrifyingly thin, but this weight loss was reportedly done under medical supervision).

Some of the near-death imagery is perversely beautiful, and that's led many to conclude that McQueen sympathizes with Sands, but the movie is suffused with pessimism, and highlights Sands' wild-eyed determination to die. "Hunger" seems aware that in the years since 1981, suicidal martyrdom has acquired something of a bad name. *

Produced by Laura Hast*ngs-Sm*th, Rob*n Gutch; d*rected by Steve McQueen; wr*tten by Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen; d*str*buted by IFC F*lms.