Justin Kurzel explores the ori­gins of a mass shoot­ing in the Nitram trailer

For a minute there, it seemed like up-and-com­ing inde­pen­dent tal­ent Justin Kurzel was going to get gob­bled up by the stu­dio sys­tem, in light of the big-bud­get mum­bo-jum­bo that was his 2016 adap­ta­tion of the Assassin’s Creed video game series. But his fol­low-up True His­to­ry of the Kel­ly Gang returned him to his roots in 2019, and it looks like his lat­est film will con­tin­ue him down that path instead of the fork that once branched out from it.

Today brings the first look at the trail­er for Nitram, anoth­er drama­ti­za­tion of real-life tragedy vis­it­ed upon the peo­ple of Kurzel’s native Aus­tralia. Just as his 2011 break­out Snow­town looked for psy­cho­log­i­cal insight in a string of ​’90s killings, the new film focus­es on a sim­i­lar­ly trag­ic inci­dent, albeit more con­cen­trat­ed in its devastation.

Over two days in April 1996, a young man named Mar­tin Bryant mur­dered 35 peo­ple and injured 23 more dur­ing a mass shoot­ing in his home of Port Arthur, to this day the most griev­ous instance of pub­lic vio­lence in the country’s his­to­ry. Amer­i­cans may be sur­prised to learn that gun laws were over­hauled in the wake of the mas­sacre, mak­ing it a turn­ing point in mod­ern his­to­ry and leav­ing Aus­tralia a safer place to be.

Kurzel’s film casts Caleb Landry-Jones in the role of Mar­tin him­self (keen-eyed read­ers will notice that the film’s title of Nitram is his name back­wards), though it seems that the film will take the We Need to Talk About Kevin-style approach of focus­ing on the strife and guilt endured by his moth­er (Essie Davis). In look­ing for an expla­na­tion for his shock­ing behav­ior, the film will delve into the rela­tion­ship between them and the fear a par­ent can have for their vio­lent, unwell child.

Nitram is cur­rent­ly slat­ed for a pre­mière on the final prop­er day of Com­pe­ti­tion screen­ings at the cur­rent­ly in-progress Cannes, on 16 July. The hot-but­ton sub­ject mat­ter may scare off some, but it also guar­an­tees a pow­er­ful reac­tion from those in atten­dance, one way or the oth­er. At any rate, Kurzel’s get­ting back to basics — his grue­some­ly gory, bit­ter, fright­en­ing, intense basics.

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