BODY POLITIC: Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands.

Before Hunger started collecting awards last year, director Steve McQueen’s best-known work was the 1997 short video Deadpan, which restages the famous “falling house” gag from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. McQueen, playing the Keaton role, stands stoic and unruffled as the facade of a cabin drops over him, his position beneath an empty window frame leaving him unscathed. The stunt crosses over into inscrutable ritual as it is represented again and again from angle after angle. Gone are Keaton’s inadvertent grace and unwitting ease with the vicissitudes of a chaotic world. Absent, too, are context and narrative. In their place is an obsessive dedication to capturing every detail of a physical act, no matter how irrational or extreme that act might be.

The leap from Keaton to the Troubles in Northern Ireland is a big one, but it’s important to keep Deadpan in mind when approaching McQueen’s daring feature debut, Hunger. The film is an ostensible account of IRA hero Bobby Sands’ 66-day hunger strike inside the notorious HM Prison Maze, but McQueen again takes source material—this time it’s history, not classic slapstick—and filters it through a rigorous vision that denies conventional pleasure and defies expectations while confirming the power of cinema to transfix and unsettle.

Some critics, The New Yorker’s David Denby among them, seem disturbed by McQueen’s stubborn refusals, in particular his chilly distance from political context. We never learn why Sands (played with furious focus by Michael Fassbender) is in prison, for instance. Nor are we told how long he’s been locked up or what his fellow prisoners have done to end up there with him. McQueen isn’t interested in explicating the complex and contested history of the region. As he told the Guardian, “Politics creates situations, but it’s left to the people to deal with it.” Hunger is a film about the front line of political struggle, that place where actual bodies clash and actual bodies break and actual bodies die—on both sides. Imagine a man trapped for eternity beneath a falling house. Imagine the terror that man might feel. McQueen wants to figure out that feeling, not explain how the house was built.

It speaks to McQueen’s oblique approach to historical narrative and his professed aim to “show both sides” that we don’t even meet Bobby Sands until 30 minutes into Hunger. Instead, we are first introduced to the daily ritual of one of the Maze’s guards, which is rendered with the same care and attention to detail that McQueen will bring to Sands’ strike in the film’s final third. The guard soaks his bloody, bruised knuckles in a porcelain sink; he eats his breakfast as crumbs fall to the napkin on his lap; he checks the undercarriage of his car for bombs as his wife observes from a window, her face communicating everything: Here’s another day my husband might die. These are vital scenes, as once we are inside the prison and witnessing the abject state of the inmates—beatings, maggots, shit-smeared walls—it is impossible to forget these tense moments in which a frightened man prepares to go to war for a paycheck.

Between the guard’s morning deliberations and Sands’ silent death lies the hell of the Maze, and the hour we spend there constitutes filmmaking of the highest order. Nearly every shot is imbued with religious devotion to the sounds and surfaces of the depredations and degradations of prison life. McQueen masterfully builds to a hectic crescendo of violence, before the frame of the film narrows to match Bobby Sands’ terrifying attenuation. It is not easy to watch, nor should it be, but there is beauty in the horror, just as there is transcendent strength in this man’s wasting shape. There are still more questions than answers, but we are sure of one thing: The place where politics becomes action is not as romantic as revolutionaries might think, nor as containable as politicians might wish.