‘He was laughing at my pain… laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world…’
As a society we have a dark obsession with mass shooters and suicide bombers. What catastrophic personal and societal failings could lead to someone doing something so heinous? So evil? As with We Need to Talk About Kevin and Elephant before it, Nitram attempts to answer that question – this time through the lens of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre on Tasmania. And it is chilling…
Nitram (Caleb Landry Jones) is a troubled and violent young man with a strained relationship with his mother (Judy Davis) and father (Anthony LaPaglia). When he meets a surrogate mother in the shape of the kindly but eccentric Helen (Essie Davis), Nitram finds himself on a path to death and destruction.
A sadly familiar tale then, and one that has been echoed elsewhere, but director Justin Kurzel does a great job in ensuring that this film has something new to say. The various failures of those around Nitram in the film and his real life inspiration Martin Bryant resulted in huge gun reform and years of recriminations. This is not to take responsibility away from the perpetrator, despite his status as an intellectually disabled man, but it is clear that this horrific event could have been prevented many times over. Kurzel shrouds the entire film in a suffocating sense of dread, only aided by a committed and disquieting performance from Landry Jones (who appears in almost every scene).
Kurzel demonstrates great restraint in not actually showing any of the massacre, instead focussing on the main players involved in a series of intimate, claustrophobic shots. The final coda plays out with only the sound of waves gently lapping against the desolate sands and it is this final fade to black that affords Nitram such power. This is an emotive but necessary film with a prescient and salient conclusion. The world is a fucked up place.