Film Review: Nitram is a tragedy of paths not taken enroute to murder
Nitram
★★★★☆
Based on the Port Arthur mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996, which caused Australia to change its gun control laws in a matter of months, (15) stars Caleb Landry Jones as the eponymous protagonist, an intellectually disabled young man based on Martin Bryant, the real-life mass murderer.
With a fetish for air rifles and fireworks, Nitram is indulged by his father (Anthony LaPaglia) and chastised by his long-suffering mother (Judy Davis), neither of whom are able to cope with his erratic mood swings and anti-social behaviour. When Nitram meets the middle-aged Helen (Essie Davis), a reclusive heiress with a penchant for Gilbert and Sullivan light opera, it seems as if his oddities and inappropriate acting out have finally encountered an understanding tolerance that will allow him to live a normal life.
The viewer, of course, knows that the story ends in tragedy, but one of the more interesting aspects of the film — written by Shaun Grant and directed by Justin Kurzel — is the number of potential turning points it offers in Nitram’s life. Nothing is inevitable here: Nitram wasn’t destined, from the moment of his birth, to wind up murdering 35 people in cold blood, and the story creates a number of tantalising moments in which Nitram might have been diverted from his course and the tragedy prevented.
Essie Davis and Judy Davis are both very strong as the women who understand better than most that the unpredictable, explosive nature of Nitram’s personality represents real and present danger, but the film belongs to Caleb Landy Jones, who brilliantly — horrifyingly — inhabits the persona of a burgeoning mass murderer who is fully aware of who and what he is.
(cinema release)
