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Prison films are beset by a fundamental paradox. Because mainstream film is reliant on a combination of the pleasure of the visual and the dramatic structuring of narrative, institutionalised incarceration based on the loss of liberty, extended temporal control and physical spatial restriction would seem to be fundamentally at odds with ‘the cinematic’. Prison as depicted on-screen is therefore a space in which visibly enacted retribution is foregrounded in a mode much more akin to what Foucault calls the pre-modern ‘theatres of torture’. The routinised banality of day-to-day life behind bars is eschewed in favour of the spectacle of the masculine body punishing or being violently punished. British cinema is replete with films set in prison, however, as the first part of this article explores, and academic analyses of such films are formulated around three discursive strands: debates around the constitution of the prison film as a genre, discussions of the potential relationship between cinematic representations and the ‘real-world’ sociology of punishment, and assertions about how national identity is reflected. The second part of this article deploys a comparative analysis of Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008) and Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), examining what is often taken for granted in previous work, namely how the environment of incarceration is produced as an aesthetic, social and even ontological space that contextualises and materialises a link between masculinity, violence and spectacle. I argue that the microcosm of the prison, on the one hand, reasserts the male body as the root of physical ‘being-ness’, yet on the other, reveals masculinity as a constructed performance determined by the social context of incarceration and amplified through cinematic aesthetics.