This is a visually stunning and brutal yet beautiful film. As Turner Prize-winning Steve McQueen's first commercial feature film, its almost morbid attention to detail and harsh use of sound make a theme of death and faith poetic and moving. And that famously longest-length take in film history, a grim yet powerful presentation of the dialogue between life and death.
The hunger strike in the second half is definitely a cruel torture to the audience. A large number of close-up shots magnify the death that is approaching every second, but everything happens so calmly: clean pictures, well-organized rhythms, interspersed with rapid and weak breathing. And almost romantic memories: the shock is not in death, but in the coolness in the face of it.
As for belief, as for sacrifice, as for politics, compared with the details of pictures and sounds, for me, it is difficult to judge right and wrong.
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