Caleb Landry Jones is unbearably lively in a film that’s all the more gut-wrenching for the off-screen violence it allows.
It’s hard to overstate the anxiety I felt anticipating seeing Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram” (an experience I’ve semi-consciously avoided since it premiered at the end of last year’s Cannes). For one thing, Kurzel has a rare gift for soul-shattering horrors. I was first introduced to his work through Snowtown, a film so all-consumingly dark it seemed like it was sucking the light out of the universe in real time, leaving only the projector beam hostage to bear witness ; It’s the sort of thing that needs to be written about in the past tense, more as the stuff of memory than something that might still be queued on Netflix because there’s no way I’m ever going to watch it again.
Snowtown, a 2011 docudrama about a series of murders that ravaged Australia in the 1990s, had a body count of 12. I knew that “Nitram” – the unflinching portrait of a young man hard-hit in the weeks before committing the worst mass shooting in his country’s history – would almost triple that number. And while it’s no secret that Kurzel’s film cuts a few milliseconds before the Port Arthur massacre begins, it made me queasy to imagine what someone with his gift for capturing the stench of corpse flowers that hangs around the roots of male violence would do with this story .
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I may not have shared the same personal objections some members of the Hobart community have had since the project was first announced (on the contrary, I have argued for the potential value of similar films), but I still wasn’t eager to to endure another bout of sickening helplessness — another “Dark Night” of the soul, haunted by the inexplicability of something millennials like me were brought up to expect like rain. As certain as I was that Caleb Landry Jones would be convincing in the title role (“Nitram” refers only to the actual perpetrator by writing his first name backwards), the mere prospect of modern cinema’s most fidgety weirdo being a mass shooter was Playing is so vivid that actually seeing it on screen almost feels unnecessary.
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In the end, Jones’ performance is even more lifelike than I feared – a tortured and amazingly nuanced portrayal of a child whose id could only be restrained by love for so long before choosing violence instead. And it goes without saying that Kurzel’s fatalistic storytelling exhumes the pain that led to that horrible day in April 1996 so sharply that you can smell death several hours in advance.
But as “Nitram” unfolds in near-perfect lockstep with the film I was anticipating, it does so towards unexpected endings. If Kurzel has made yet another film about the impenetrable mystery of why someone is forced to slaughter innocent people, he has also made one that unequivocally underscores the how. One of the many reasons that “Nitram” doesn’t need to portray the escalating terror is that the film’s only real conflict is between the inscrutability of its crime and the obviousness with which it was committed.
The film is structured like the darkest joke ever told (did you hear the one about the seriously distraught young man who walked into a gun shop with a duffel bag full of cash and asked to buy an AR-15?), and the Pointe is the salesman who explains without irony that his customer would have needed a license if he wanted a gun. After 90 minutes, with the storm clouds of an atrocity darkening on the horizon, “Nitram” pauses to proclaim that it would not have been done in the first place – that this man’s life would not have led to the end of so many others – if we didn’t make heavy-duty killing machines available to anyone who had the money to pay for them. History has confirmed this, and Kurzel’s account is steeped in the horror of his own avoidability. It’s only when “Nitram” moves beyond what should have been the end of this story that her tension really becomes unbearable.
Not that earlier sections of the film are any less difficult to watch. Even the snippet of archival footage at the very beginning is troubling, as the actual perpetrator appears as a young boy in a Tasmanian incineration unit who, to the bewilderment of a local news crew, states in no uncertain terms that he won’t stop playing with the fireworks that scalded his body . And he doesn’t. As an adult, Nitram is still a child. The precise nature of his intellectual disability is as elusive as it is irrelevant to this story — and Jones’ Roman candle of a performance is too raw and implosive to be diagnostically addressed — but it’s clear he’s not changed since day in the hospital he only got bigger.
“Nitra”
Nitram still loves fireworks, which makes him more popular with the kids at the elementary school near his childhood home than with the neighbors. And that’s a good thing, too, because he relates better to children—who are similarly driven by impulses and unfazed by consequences—than to adults. Nitram’s mother (a brilliant Judy Davis, tormenting and severe as a woman who has lost her son in all ways a mother cannot) has lost her patience for his antics and provides him with medication to limit her losses. His “good cop,” the overly permissive father (a sweet and heartbreakingly sad Anthony LaPaglia), on the other hand, has deluded himself that if only he could save enough money to buy his dream home, everything would work itself out.
Neither of them knows what to do with their malicious son, and each of them has severed different parts of themselves to stop the pain from spreading. Aided by the film’s impeccable cast, Shaun Grant’s screenplay finds compassion for Nitram’s parents without fully absolving them of their son’s actions; In a sense, they are his first victims, but they were also their community’s first line of defense.
The only adult who can relate to Nitram at his level is a mad heiress named Helen (a predictably remarkable Essie Davis), whom he meets while touring the neighborhood and threatening to mow people’s lawns. Details of her bio remain unclear, and Nitram isn’t the type to ask questions, but Helen’s ramshackle mansion suggests her life was also stunted by tragedy – the Miss Havisham vibes are strong, but her cat t-shirt is , moldy braces and a tendency to giggle imply (exactly or not) that her internal clock stopped ticking before she was old enough to put on a wedding dress. Impressed by Nitram in a sometimes disturbingly erotic way, Helen offers her new boyfriend the love he always needed, but also threatens to leave him a loss he never knew.
Even the lightest moments of their time together (like driving around Hobart while singing Gilbert & Sullivan) are soured by a sense that something is fundamentally wrong and Nitram’s penchant for dodging traffic – figuratively and literally – ensures every scene is ignited with fear. And while “Nitram” doesn’t warn viewers about its namesake’s place in history, the film is so palpably imbued with sickness that even people who don’t know where it’s leading won’t be shocked when it gets there.
Instead of tension, Kurzel constantly pulls the oxygen out of the frame until you gasp for someone to intervene. By the time Nitram enters this gun shop, even the crazies posing with assault rifles on their Christmas cards might be ok with mandatory background checks. Of course, Kurzel’s film was not made for foreign audiences, and “Nitram” ends with a sickening warning to American viewers who might be inclined to claim this tragedy as their own: no part of Australia has fully implemented the firearms restrictions imposed after Port Arthur massacres have been signed into law and there are more guns in the country today than there were in 96.
In that light – and given the controversy Kurzel’s film sparked in his home state – it might be fair to argue that “Nitram” is ultimately not for the people who are still haunted by the events of Port Arthur, the people alone who lost loved ones on that horrible day. Perhaps (and perhaps wrongly) it’s just another tax on the priceless price they paid for their community’s failures. I can no more argue away their pain than I can insist that IndieWire readers should endure this crooked nightmare of a film for their benefit, and no film about a mass shooting has ever spoken so openly about the film’s inability to directly prevent the next one .
Kurzel recognizes that such atrocities create only a short window of opportunity to enact changes in the law; he knows that “Nitram” comes several decades too late. So he and Grant set out to do something that could lead to a shift in blame instead — something that places the blame firmly on the abuser (and, to some degree, his parents) while also clarifying that responsibility for the reaction lies it falls directly on “us”. That we’re no different than the little boy in the Tasmanian combustion unit who, when asked if he’s learned his lesson about playing with firecrackers, bluntly replies, “Yes, but I still play with it.” It’s a giggling moment , in which kids say the craziest things, but you won’t laugh when “Nitram” makes us feel like the butt of the joke.
Grade: B+
“Nitram” is now in select theaters, on VOD and streaming on AMC+.
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