Hunger, the first feature film from the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen, confounds all expectations and epitomises exactly why everyone should be forced to view the works of art they think they understand and expect to despise.

The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who starves himself to death, is several things. Almost none of them are what a biased observer would expect McQueen’s film to be.

Astonishingly McQueen’s film is unnervingly beautiful and disturbingly even-handed.

The depiction of the brutality to which the Republican inmates in the Maze were subjected at that most appalling of troubled times in Ireland is hard to stomach.

But what McQueen also manages to do is point out how both sides were brutalised. More prison officers were assassinated, the film indicates, than IRA political prisoners died on hunger strike.

This is not a commercial film. Having seen it at Cannes, I re-watched it recently at Dinard, the festival of British films in France, alongside the producer of  another cult big-screen hit, Man on Wire.

That producer pointed out that almost the most minor of his projects on television had been viewed by more people than had actually paid to see his acclaimed story of the highwire artist, Philippe Pettit.

With those kind of economics in mind, the UK Film Council is paying to ensure a wider distribution of Hunger. See it at the London Film Festival this weekend or take advantage of the Film Council’s munificence.

I am not at all convinced of Channel 4’s special pleading for public service subsidy. But it is undoubtedly the case that in backing McQueen, it has enabled a jaw-droppingly stunning work of art to be made – one that no commercial organisation could conceivably have backed.

Liam Cunningham, one of the film’s stars, has spoken repeatedly and movingly about the originality of  McQueen’s vision and technique.

The least the rest of us can do is go and see it. It’s not easy. But do. There is no other film this year I would insist you view.