IT TAKES a brave man to make a film about Bobby Sands, who was committed for 12 years to the Maze prison in 1981 for the possession of firearms and was the first of those who starved themselves to death because the Thatcher Government refused to treat them as political prisoners.

But clearly Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen is such a man. Making his first feature film, he is assisted by a virtuoso performance from Michael Fassbender as Sands that entails a physical representation of death by starvation.

This is not a comfortable film to watch but it is a consistently powerful one which justly won the Camera d’Or for the best debut at Cannes. McQueen hasn’t made an ordinary docudrama but a film which attempts with its varying styles to push out beyond a tough and uncompromising realism.

He is as much concerned with the weaknesses and strengths of the flesh as any moral or political statement. We see, often in minute detail, the excreta smeared on the walls of the IRA prisoners walls, the urine forming puddles in the jail’s corridors, abandoned food alive with maggots, naked men with badly beaten flesh with police in riot gear bearing down upon them and Sands’s own body gradually succumbing to his fast.

McQueen clearly wants to show us exactly what it was physically like to make such a stand. But he also shows us the perils of being a warder in the Maze, endangered in the prison itself and threatened with death in a grey and fraught world outside.

He does this through the stoic character of Raymond Lohan (very well played by Stuart Graham), whom we first see painfully bathing his bruised hands in a bathroom sink after an encounter with the prisoners. Lohan is an ordinary man with a family who, because of the situation, is drawn into excess. He is not a villain but a pawn in increasingly horrendous circumstances, his personal fastidiousness failing to ward off the filth and stink and moral turpitude of the Maze.

The other notable performance is from Liam Cunningham as the Catholic priest who, in a 22-minute sequence when the camera never moves, argues with Sands about the sense of his martyrdom. Some have found this long scene, however well-played, a distraction from the main matter in hand, which is how humans behave towards one another in extremes. But it is essential to the argument and there surely has to be one section which is not purely relaying the terrible events of the time.

This is where Irish playwright Enda Walsh, co-writer of the screenplay with McQueen, comes in and we realise for the first time how divorced from contact with the outside world, including the Republican leadership, Sands and his fellow prisoners have become.

Hunger is far and away more discomforting than most horror movies. The mind inevitably comes forward 30 years to the present day when events have occurred in Iran and in Cuba that are not so very different. McQueen has not just made a striking film. He has forced us to see how we might behave in strained and unfamiliar circumstances when those who rule us lead us into the mire.