Nitram

Justin Kurzel turns his camera on the events leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur killings in Tasmania.

Caleb Landry Jones and Essie Davis

The Australian director Justin Kurzel made his name with his very first feature, 2011’s Snowtown. It had a screenplay by Shaun Grant who is also the writer on Nitram which is Kurzel's latest film and his finest. It again illustrates Kurzel’s tendency to tackle tough subject matter but the key characteristic of this new work is restraint. That needs to be emphasised because Snowtown and Nitram are films dealing with men responsible for real-life mass killings and such material can easily lend itself to exploitative movie-making. However, Snowtown, despite dealing with the twelve murders perpetrated by John Bunting, mostly avoided any detailed scenes of violence and Nitram goes even further in this respect as it studies Martin Bryant and the events that led to his killing thirty-five people in April 1996 in Port Arthur, Tasmania.

In the film the central character (Caleb Landry Jones) is only referred to as Nitram which is said to be a nickname bestowed on him in school as a put-down and which is, of course, Martin spelt backwards. It is also the case that his parents, the strong forceful mother (Judy Davis) and the weak readily put-upon father (Anthony LaPaglia), are described simply as Mum and Dad. Indeed, there is no hint at the start to indicate to audiences not in the know that this is indeed a film portraying the world of Martin Bryant. The name itself features only in the written statements that conclude Nitram and it may be the case that Shaun Grant’s screenplay draws on the facts without adhering to them in every detail. But what counts is that everything rings true and that extends to the strange rapport that grew up between Nitram, then in his late twenties, and a middle-aged woman named Helen (Essie Davis). She was a former actress who had won a fortune and who, when Nitram rebelled against living with his parents, allowed the young man into her house and into her life. If that sounds like an improbable plot development, that is not the case because this too is taken from what actually happened. But, if in theory parts of the tale might have seemed too outlandish to convince, any potential disbelief is fully suspended because Kurzel has obtained outstanding performances from his cast and especially from his lead actor and from both Judy and Essie Davis.

Although Kurzel’s choice of material has caused some controversy, the film he has given us is not in the least exploitative and nor is it in any way guilty of glamorising the character of the killer. Whether or not his approach angers some people, what Kurzel has done is to make Nitram a pitiful figure – there is no excusing of his actions, no pleas for sympathy, but he emerges like the killer in Michael Powell’s classic Peeping Tom (1960) as somebody tragically shaped by his experiences. However, that comparison does not mean that Nitram is in any sense a horror movie or even a thriller. Instead, this is the study of an individual which invites us to see how his destiny could have been shaped by some or all of many factors in his life. These include a health issue (he is on antidepressants), a rebellious nature, a mother who has failed to show affection, the sense of his father being a pawn of fate and weak with it and a difficulty in making friends or finding a place where he feels that he belongs. To all that can in time be added an inability to come to terms with tragic events that occur and his own personal sense of guilt in that connection. The film is never didactic instead inviting the viewer to decide what weight to give to these matters and perhaps encouraging the feeling that any of us could have been in Nitram’s shoes and might not have been able to escape the path that he took.

Nitram is at its best in raising all these questions and slightly more routine in the later stages of the narrative which are more conventional even if sometimes powerful (such as the scene in which Nitram has no problem in buying guns). More original, of course, is the decision to build up to the final violence but not to show it. This is not a unique approach: in 2016 Tim Sutton made Dark Night which similarly stopped just short in its portrayal of a mass killing in a cinema. But, if that film set out to look at contemporary society and to suggest how difficult it is to spot who might become this kind of shooter, Nitram even more interestingly asks us to consider and to understand how circumstances might easily conspire to lead someone down that route. Nitram is a sensitive, persuasive film admirably directed and quite brilliantly acted and the last of the concluding written statements confirms just how timely it is.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Essie Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Sean Keenan, Conrad Brandt, Ethan Cook, Phoebe Taylor, Jessie Ward, Zaidee Ward.

Dir Justin Kurzel, Pro Nick Batzias, Shaun Grant, Justin Kurzel and Virginia Whitwell, Screenplay Shaun Grant, Ph Germain McMicking, Pro Des Alice Babidge, Ed Nick Fenton, Music Jed Kurzel, Costumes Alice Babidge.

Good Things/Stan Originals/Melbourne International Film Festival-Picturehouse Entertainment.
112 mins. Australia. 2021. UK Rel: 1 July 2022. Cert. 15.