Nitram ★★★★
MA 15+, 112 minutes

Nitram is the story of Martin Bryant, the young man who killed 35 people and wounded 23 others at Port Arthur in April 1996 – except that it’s not quite that simple. The character is never named, except with the nickname Nitram (Martin spelled backwards) and the shootings at Port Arthur are not shown. Nor is the character wholly consistent with what we know about the real man, who has been in jail ever since. The outrage about the making of the film has been predictable – and almost all of it before anyone saw the film. For some, the story has no right to be told.

Caleb Landry Jones in the title role of Nitram.

The Texan actor Caleb Landry Jones, who plays “Nitram”, looks very like the real man, with his lank blonde hair concealing a bland face. By omitting his name, Tasmanian-based film-maker Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, Macbeth) tries to signal his intention not to add to the man’s desire to create a legend. Some of the families of the victims might say he could have done that better by not making the film.

That sensitivity is undeniable and understandable, but by the same logic, there would be no films about the Holocaust, or any other violent outrage. Every crime has its victim(s), but not every crime raises questions about who we are as a country. Port Arthur did that. The shock and revulsion were such that John Howard was able to pass laws restricting gun ownership just 12 days after the shootings. The end titles mention that. They add that no state has fully complied with the terms of the National Firearms Agreement since the law was passed. In that sense, this is an anti-gun movie, aimed not just at ourselves, but beyond our shores. The Australian writer Shaun Grant (Snowtown, Penguin Bloom) started writing it while living in Los Angeles, as shootings were happening around where he lived.

Essie Davis as Helen in Nitram.

One of the more chilling scenes shows how easy it was for this disaffected young man to buy semi-automatic weapons from a gun shop in Hobart. The scene plays as a fulcrum, a moment that defines the movie’s reason for being, but what else is there to cling to, in terms of meaning?

Kurzel has a special talent for the dark corners of Australian culture. Snowtown was a lesson in how to film the unfilmable. Nitram might be termed a lesson in knowing the unknowable. It doesn’t explain the shooter; it simply suggests how such a character might have evolved. It’s their version of him; other versions are equally possible. There is not much of the troubled childhood and the kid who continually escalated to violence at school, or allegedly tortured animals. This version of him seems to love animals.

On the other hand, there is a profound family drama, with Judy Davis at her most astringent as his long-suffering mother, and Anthony LaPaglia as a father stifling screams of despair. Each of these is superb. As a portrait of a family where love is not enough, it achieves high potency, without crossing into the difficult terrain of begging for sympathy. This boy is bad news. The movie never asks why – he was just born that way. His mother does not abandon him, even when he takes up with the lonely heiress Helen Harvey (Essie Davis) who treats him as another stray, to add to the 10 dogs and countless cats she is already tending. Harvey actually lived with her own aging mother in a rambling mansion – but there’s only room for one mother in this story.

Kurzel and Grant do not offer any easy answers, beyond the obvious: keep the guns under control. Even some of the families would agree with that. Landry Jones won the best actor prize at the most recent Cannes Film Festival for this work. His performance is riveting, suspended between pain and rage, with little self-awareness. This boy has grown up isolated, bullied at school, aware of his mental deficiencies but with little sense of reality or impulse control. As some people warned before he did what he did, he was an outrage waiting to happen. We are left to wonder why, and what might have helped, or stopped him.

In selected cinemas where open and coming soon to Stan. Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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