Those unfamiliar with the real-life basis for Justin Kurzel’s Nitram—the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, which left 35 people dead—may be forgiven for mistaking the film’s first hour as a riff on Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude. In it, a scraggly, neurodivergent outsider (Caleb Landry Jones) ends up forming an enigmatic relationship with a wealthy older woman, Helen (Essie Davis), and much to the chagrin of his mother (Judy Davis). In contrast to Harold and Maude, though, this unconventional relationship is neither quirky nor charming, forming instead part of Nitram’s starkly unromantic portrait of small-town life and one marginalized, ostensibly amoral young man.
The affair between the motherly Helen and Jones’s stunted man-child ends in tragedy, which amplifies the darker portents that Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant have been planting from the start of Nitram. The film opens with what seems to be documentary footage of a children’s burn ward in 1979, featuring a younger version of our protagonist telling the interviewer that he will continue playing with firecrackers despite having been seriously burned while doing so. This mindlessly destructive flirtation with danger, from playing with firecrackers to poking at beehives to toying around with BB guns, continues to drive his activities as a grown man, as we discover when Nitram flashes forward to the late ’80s.
Although Jones’s character is intended to be Martin Bryant, the mass shooter who’s currently serving 35 consecutive life sentences and an additional 1,652 years without parole, he’s never called by name in the film. Some locals call him Nitram, a mocking sobriquet from his high school days that would seem to allude to his otherness—specifically, one assumes, his backwardness (the word is Martin spelled backwards). The filmmakers may be laying it on a bit thick with this probably fabricated detail, but the decision to not even have his parents address him by name emphasizes their inability to be warm toward their son given his fragility.
The protagonist’s mother is the most apparent source of parental complexes, casting coolly judgmental glares at her son’s oddball behavior in almost every scene they share. In one of Nitram’s most haunting moments, she describes to Helen an episode from her son’s childhood in which he delighted in making her think that he’d gone missing. Rather than the folly of a child, his mother apparently interprets this as a personal affront for which she bears a grudge. Whether this anecdote about her son’s callousness actually foreshadows his heinous crime is left ambiguous; as the film shows us in its final act, the massacre was never an inevitability.
Indeed, Kurzel and Grant don’t simply blame the mother, as the woman and her husband (Anthony LaPaglia) are clearly broken down by a long line of bad breaks and years of dealing with their son’s tendency toward chaos—and within an environment that isn’t portrayed as being especially conducive to human warmth. Here, Port Arthur is sparse and drab, the open fields that spread out beyond the widely dispersed buildings empty and uninviting, the nearby ocean with its surfers merely a symbol of the life that the protagonist can’t fit into.
Jones, who won best actor at last year’s Cannes for this performance, channels both childlike naïveté and incel-like masculine resentment in his portrayal of the grungy loner. At once sympathetic in his evident inner pain and alienating in his unpredictable behavior, the character has an elusive quality that Jones keeps from sliding into vagueness or caricature. When, bedridden after a car accident, his pale-pink face turns bright red as he begins howling in evident emotional anguish, it’s both distressing and bewildering, an outburst with clear causes but whose uncertain motivation makes for a queasy scene.
The delicate balancing act of Jones’s performance, and of Nitram as a whole, tips firmly to one side in the end, as our protagonist begins preparations for what even viewers unfamiliar with the Port Arthur massacre will now know is coming. Here, the film takes a polemical jab at gun laws as they stood in Australia in the 1990s, showing the ease with which a young man, now loaded with gobs cash that his lover left to him, acquires a veritable arsenal of guns.
The outrageousness of this clearly disturbed man accessing so much killing power without so much as a signature doesn’t merely serve as a reminder about the importance of the gun laws that were passed in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre. It’s also clearly meant to cast a reflection on another country that faces the same problem on what often feels like a daily basis, and can’t pull its shit together to get anything done about it.
In the run-up to its shudder-inducing finale, Nitram condenses itself into something of a message movie. But this is hardly a simplified moral tale that roots the epidemic of mass gun violence in a single overriding cause. Implicit in its bleak but sympathetic portrait of a disturbed and shunned young man is that sometimes it takes a village to make a monster.
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