Review of Nitram
Nitram (2022) Dir. Justin Kurzel
The controversial subject of mass shooting is explored in Nitram, a semi-fictionalised account of real-life Australian Martin Bryant and his involvement in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.
Opening with disturbing real-life footage, Nitram (Caleb Landry Jones) is introduced as a disturbed and awkward young man who dreams of a cool surfer life but is obsessed with firecrackers and ignored (and hated) by his neighbours. Child-like as he plays on swings, director Kurzel has his life switch between dreamy innocence against an increasingly isolated and disturbed reality.
Nitram’s parents seems unwilling to face his problems and when he starts a lawnmower business, he befriends Helen (Essie Davis), an eccentric older lady who he soon moves in with. Without a driving license, Nitram’s regular impulsive lunging for the car’s wheel eventually causes an accident leading to her death. Yet when he's interviewed in hospital he claims he was asleep.
Nitram inherits much of the woman’s wealth and when his father misses out on a property opportunity, his disorder gets worse as he purchases guns, abuses his dad and the film then suggests the Dunblane massacre (a similar event in Scotland the same year) could have been an inspiration.
The film comes close to humanising the real-life murderer but if you watch the police interviews, Martin Bryant was more over-the-top than this portrayal. If anything Caleb underplays him as footage shows Bryant is not that deep – he’s a pathetic individual, without remorse, laughing at his acts.
Wisely avoiding the most brutal aspects, the film stops as the massacre begins, Nitram is powerful, emotional and outrageous in all the ways it should be.
35 people ended up dying at Port Arthur and Kurzel’s film is a provocative work for sure. But with four lead actors giving sensitive and nuanced performances it’s a movie that could have so easily tripped up but rarely does. It’s blunt and bleak and that’s what it needs to be.
As it stands, Nitram is a provocative and enraging account of a horrendous incident that changed life, and the law, in Australia forever. That nation, and the world, was scarred forever by those horrors and Kurzel encapsulates people’s dismay in this shocking and thought-provoking piece.
★★★★
Michael Sales
Nitram is out in UK cinemas from 1st July
