Watching this movie requires patience, even though it's only 90 minutes long.
The film is slow-paced and full of long still shots; the dialogue is thin, with the exception of 17 minutes of unmoved dialogue shots and a 5-minute monologue in the middle, the language seems so lifeless in this film.
It takes courage to watch this movie because it is full of outright filth, violence and cruelty.
The film focuses on this gloomy and horrific prison from beginning to end, allowing the audience to witness the raw and brutal scenes - the feces that smear the walls in "The Filthy Protest", the bloody brutality of the prison guards when they suppress the resistance, and The Northern Irish Republican Army will take brutal revenge for the death of a prison guard's son in front of his mother.
It's best to watch this movie in a room with sunlight, but even sunlight can't dispel the icy cold that seeps into the bone marrow that the movie brings.
After starting the hunger strike, the protagonist Bobby Sands lost weight shockingly, and we watched life slowly and slowly pass from this body, and after 66 days, only the terrifying body and the bones were left. Unyielding fighting spirit.
"Hunger", the debut of a 39-year-old director, tells a true story of not looking ahead and refusing to compromise and give in in an extremely stylized film language. Whether it's the 17-minute long-shot dialogue or the impactful presentation of the characters' status after the hunger strike, the whole film's choreography, photography, and performance all show a resolute and firm temperament that never hesitates or is moderate.
As a result, the story born in such an ugly world has a heavy poetic effect in the end, and the patience, depression, and dullness that I had in watching the first half of the film also turned into a deep shock at the end. Of course it wasn't a pleasant viewing experience, and I needn't deny the depression and discomfort it brought me. But the movie finally achieves a perfect unity of the story itself and the form of expression, and appeals to your eyes, mind and heart with its deep power.
A movie like this is awe-inspiring, even if it's a movie I'd never want to see a second time.
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