Nitram

Justin Kurzel is quick­ly becom­ing the fore­most cin­e­mat­ic chron­i­cler of Aus­tralian true crime. Hav­ing kicked off his direct­ing career in 2011 with Snow­town, recall­ing the series of mur­ders com­mit­ted in and around Ade­laide in the 1990s, he cov­ered the exploits of out­law Ned Kel­ly in his last fea­ture, True His­to­ry of the Kel­ly Gang, in 2019.

His fifth film, Nitram, returns to this ter­ri­to­ry by cen­tring on the ​’96 Port Arthur mas­sacre. The worst mass shoot­ing in Aus­tralian his­to­ry saw 35 peo­ple killed and a fur­ther 23 injured in the Tas­man­ian tourist des­ti­na­tion. Mar­tin Bryant, who car­ried out the attack, was sen­tenced to 35 life sen­tences with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole.

Kurzel reteams with screen­writer Shaun Grant, who also wrote the screen­plays for Snow­town and True His­to­ry of the Kel­ly Gang. Caleb Landry Jones is ​“Nitram” (Mar­tin back­wards) with a sur­pris­ing­ly good Aus­tralian accent, while Judy Davis and Antho­ny LaPaglia play his con­cerned but ulti­mate­ly lov­ing par­ents. Track­ing Nitram over an unknown peri­od, we wit­ness as he forms a close rela­tion­ship with wealthy mis­fit Helen (Essie Davis), only to suf­fer a series of tragedies that send him down the destruc­tive path which would send shock­waves around Australia.

The prob­lem with Nitram is the prob­lem with true crime more gen­er­al­ly since the genre explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty: the focus con­tin­ues to be on the per­pe­tra­tors of these hor­rif­ic crimes rather than their vic­tims. These peo­ple remain anony­mous, almost an after­thought, as Kurzel and Grant are so intent on por­tray­ing the human face of the Port Arthur massacre.

The team go to great lengths to show Nitram as a lone­ly, awk­ward soul whose predilec­tion towards fire­works and firearms are con­cern­ing but ulti­mate­ly bal­anced by his love of ani­mals and dev­as­ta­tion when he los­es his best friend and father in quick suc­ces­sion. It’s clear that the inten­tion here is to human­ise Bryant, to high­light that mon­sters can come from any­where, but this feels like a path film­mak­ers have trod­den time and time before, from 1968’s The Boston Stran­gler to 2017’s My Friend Dahmer.

The film also overem­pha­sis­es Nitram’s dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship with his moth­er, as though her stern nature was inte­gral to his deci­sion to com­mit such a dev­as­tat­ing act of vio­lence. The link between psy­chopa­thy and ​“mom­my issues” is inher­ent­ly flawed and more than a lit­tle misog­y­nis­tic, espe­cial­ly giv­en that Nitram’s father is por­trayed in a much more favourable light. Full cred­it to Judy Davis though, who does her best to bring to life a thin­ly-sketched char­ac­ter. (The real-life Car­leen Bryant believed her son to be inno­cent, despite the over­whelm­ing evi­dence against him, until as recent­ly at 2016).

What pur­pose does it real­ly serve to remind audi­ences that mon­sters live among us? It’s a mes­sage that’s forced on us on a near dai­ly basis. Not a sin­gle one of Bryant’s vic­tims is named in the film, and while a title card at the end explains how attempts to reform Aus­tralian gun con­trol have ulti­mate­ly been unsuc­cess­ful, Kurzel offers no answers as to why.

Although the film avoids depict­ing any act of vio­lence (aside from that which Nitram inflicts on his father and a shoot­ing we hear but don’t see) its sym­pa­thies seem strange­ly weight­ed in favour of a man who showed none to the peo­ple he murdered.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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