Direction: Justin Kurzel
Country: Australia
Given a clinical treatment by the Australian director Justin Kurzel (The Snowtown Murders, 2011; Macbeth, 2015), Nitram is a slow, suffocating psychological drama based on the 1996 mass shooting that occurred in Port Arthur, Tasmania, where 35 people were shot by a mentally unstable young man.
Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, 2017; Get Out, 2017) stars as the title character (the nickname Nitram is Martin spelled backwards), a troubled, formerly bullied boy who, even on medication, sometimes doesn’t know what to do with the loneliness and infinite sadness he experiences in a daily basis. All the same, there’s something inherently evil in him, and his parents know it. Whereas his patient father (Anthony LaPaglia) always tries to ease things up, the mother (Judy Davis) doesn’t seem to know how to react properly to his defiance, usually showing coldness and strictness or pushing him to the edge. We’re talking about a person with fixed ideas - fireworks, guns, surf - who’s not capable to measure the danger in particular situations.
Unexpectedly, his pain is substantially eased and his mind pacified when he meets Helen (Essie Davis), a wealthy and much older woman who, like him, lives a solitary life. When everything seemed to go so well, an accident reverts every improvement he had made.
You know what's going to happen at the end, but Kurzel, who worked from a screenplay by Shaun Grant, gives the audience precious details that help shaping the protagonist with faultless depressive realism. This unsettling account works like the implacable pull of a bad dream, and comes stripped of any possible sentimentality associated with the criminal act itself.
It will likely lodge in your head for a while, thanks to the rigor with which it was mounted, and the top-notch performances from Landry Jones and Judy Davis.
