Turner Prize-winning British artist Steve McQueen makes his feature debut with Hunger (Criterion Blu-Ray), a tough, soul-rattling film about brutality and deprivation conceived as a sensory overload. Not a bio-pic in the conventional mode, the drama takes an inside-out view of events leading to the 1981 hunger strike and death of Irish Republic Army activist Bobby Sands, and nine others, in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. The shit-covered cell walls, the obscenely brutal beatings, even the seemingly mundane act routine of someone washing their hands, boast an acutely amplified resonance, as the camera boxes the viewer within a living hell that also becomes a platform for transcendence. Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) is extraordinary as Sands, literally starving himself to skin-and-bone. McQueen’s severe, minimalist approach to the material makes Hunger’s statement more aesthetic, perhaps, than humanist. It’s no less wrenching for that, perhaps more so. Bonus points for the climactic use of Maya Beiser’s searing  cello performance of Sofiya Gubaidulina’s “In Croce,” which underscores the already Christ-like Sand’s act of brotherly sacrifice.