Steve McQueen’s first feature film, Hunger, was a stunning and self-assured debut for the director. It was a gut-wrenching, brutal look at the 1981 Irish hunger strike starring a still relatively unknown Michael Fassbender in a career-defining role. Seven years later, McQueen has returned to the historical drama genre for an adaptation of 12 Years a Slave, an 1853 autobiography by Solomon Northup, a free man from the North abducted and sold into slavery in the South. The results make Hunger look like a Disney film in comparison, as McQueen pulls no punches in giving moviegoers the most honest, unflinching film about American slavery to date.
12 Years a Slave is the kind of movie where audiences sit and try to compose themselves as the credits roll rather than gather their things together to leave the theater. It is not cinema as escapism, but something like the exact opposite. Where many films about slavery, even the most well-meaning ones, gloss over its sheer brutality, McQueen very deliberately puts that brutality on full display. The result never comes across as gratuitous violence-for-the-sake-of-violence, but rather as a statement: This is what it was like, the original sin of the United States of America.
Some critics complained that 12 Years a Slave is too beautifully shot for a film about such an ugly subject. Those critics missed the point. It is a film about contrasts. White plantation owners live on beautiful, sprawling estates surrounded by opulence while only several yards away their slaves live in filth and squalor. A man who was loved by his family and respected by his peers in free society is treated worse than an animal after his freedom is snatched away from him. The true horror is how easily it all happened, how an entire country let it happen.
That’s what makes 12 Years a Slave such an effective film: it out-horrors any horror movie around just by sheer virtue of its veracity. McQueen took the details for the film from Northrup’s autobiography. He didn’t embellish, because he didn’t need to. These were horrors that really happened, not just to Northrop but to millions of other slaves as well. It’s disheartening that it has taken this long for a film this honest about slavery to be made, but now we have it, and it is nothing less than a masterpiece.
