Hunger is about the body, its waste and torments. Excrement smears the IRA inmates' walls in director Steve McQueen's debut film about the 1981 Irish hunger strike led by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender). Piss is funneled under cellblock doors to flood the hall. Nightsticks rain down on naked flesh. Food is refused to the point of fatal emaciation.

But McQueen (no relation) bristled when an audience member at a recent IFC Center Q& A called it violent. "Show me a summer blockbuster whose death toll and wasted bullets don't outnumber Hunger's," he reasoned. But Hunger's unflinching portrayal of corporal punishment, self-inflicted or not, sears the retinas more than any comic book adaptation's could. It's a testament to McQueen that his debut film will likely force you to avert your eyes.

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The first thing that may strike you as you watch Hunger, British director Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 "dirty strike" and subsequent hunger strikes by IRA members locked up in Maze Prison that ended with ten deaths by starvation, is how aware you of the physicality of the bodies onscreen. You don't have to see a hell of a lot of movies before you become accustomed to the people on screen lacking the weight and gravity of real human beings, and stop thinking of them as being composed of flesh and blood and having nerve endings. That's just a natural consequence of seeing so many films where the people are basically props, and where the heroes can stoically bounce back from any amount of punishment. Somehow McQueen, a gallery artist with extensive filmmaking experience who's making his debut here as a director of features meant for theatrical release, rights the balance, keeping you conscious of the characters' physical powers and limitations, and the effect is disorienting and not a little subversive. It's also harrowing, because Hunger is a movie in which just about everything those bodies experience is unpleasant.

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