Prisoners

McQueen takes us from their initial protests-refusing to wear clothes or bathe, covering themselves and their cell walls with excrement-and the brutal retaliation of the prison wardens, to the endgame of the hunger strike that resulted in the death of eight men, the most prominent of whom, Bobby Sands, was elected as a member of the parliament just prior to his demise. The central situation-the emotionally numbing effect of a teenage girl's fatal overdose on her drug-using peers and intimates-is interwoven with the predicaments of a teenage shutin with an anxiety disorder and an elderly woman struggling to break through to her depressed husband after his return from a hospital stay.