Nitram: A masterpiece of a film which depicts with sensitivity and power how a mass shooter comes to be
Nitram was released in Australia in non-locked downed states on September 30. It will be available on Australian streaming service Stan from 24 November. It is due for release outside Australia in 2022.
Towards the end of the Australian film ‘Nitram’ its eponymous character, or at least his bullied nickname, hears a local news report of a massacre in a school in Dunblane which describes the perpetrator as a “misfit, a loner, an oddball and a weirdo” which could also be describing him. The report features the audio of someone on the scene of the Scottish tragedy which is prescient for the crimes the film’s central character will go on to commit; “Evil visited us yesterday. We don’t know why. We don’t understand it. I guess we never will.”
Of course Nitram is Martin spelt backwards and the character, though dramatised, is based on Australia’s worst ever modern gun shooter Martin Bryant, who killed 35 and wounded 23 in April 1996 at a historic tourist site named Port Arthur in Tasmania. This event is still such a wound in the nation’s psyche, especially in Tasmania, that while the film was shooting in Victoria last year it was branded as insensitive and exploitative for financial gain, as well as accused of being made without the cooperation of the victims’ families and survivors.
Even when the film premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to mostly laudatory reviews and won Best Actor for the extraordinary, incendiary performance of Texan Caleb Landry Jones (whose Australian accent is probably the best I’ve ever heard an American do) many in the Australian public could not be open to the possibility of the film’s power and sensitivity, or that the film may have something very important and preventative to say. In one very popular true crime podcast Facebook group a number of people posted that they would not see something that humanised a monster for entertainment even though many of the same people had likely listened to the podcast episode on the Port Arthur massacre.
The film is so much more than this fearful, closed and simplistic reading. While everyone has the right not to see the film, this does not diminish the film’s power or import. Chiefly, the film has many urgent things to say and lessons to learn and questions to pose for all of us if we are open enough to face them. In no way is it exploitative, no violence is ever shown and the Nitram character is never redeemed or easily explained with a tragic backstory, though there is much tragedy throughout. The film leads up to the point where the inexplicable evil acts start but unlike that Dunblane news report the film gives a very coherent, complex psychological portrait of how things went so horrifically wrong with its protagonist.
The film takes its audience into the hostile and isolating thoughts, sounds (brilliantly immersive sound design by James Ashton and score by Jed Kurzel) and anti social behaviour of a young man who from the film’s very opening interview footage of the real Martin Bryant aged 11 in hospital after playing with fireworks has never been able to learn the life lessons that most of us can. This is a young man who never fits in, has no real friends, is bullied, who in turn bullies and antagonises others and cannot let go of powerful resentments against those he feels have wronged him or the few people precious to him. Filmmaker Justin Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant have elected not to explicitly depict Martin Bryant’s very low IQ or directly reference his Asperger Syndrome in their main character but the film vividly depicts his emotional disturbance. He sees a GP who has him on tricyclic antidepressants but who does a very basic checklist assessment of his mental state without addressing him directly, only through his mother. This doctor does suggest that he see someone to talk through his problems but woefully under reaches. Clearly, the mental health treatment is profoundly below the kind of care he needs.
Instead it falls on his very long suffering parents, played with heartbreaking and doomed nuance by Judy Davis and Anthony La Paglia, who do the very best they can but both are ground down without any real hope for their son’s future. These are very far from your usual depictions of the parents of such a killer.
At the centre of this perspective is Landry Jones’s devastatingly immersive performance. The isolation, the not belonging, the invalidations and the powerful escalating resentments leave the viewer in no doubt how disturbed this young man is. There are moments of joy especially when he meets the eccentric heiress Helen (played with sustained sadness by Essie Davis) who gives him love, companionship, and purpose. But this also does not last as tragedy falls on tragedy.
Crucially, Kurzel and Grant do have a very moral but not preachy purpose in a similar way to their approach to another infamous Australian serial killer in Kurzel’s debut feature ‘Snowtown.’ Writer Grant has said he wrote the script after his wife only narrowly missed being at their local Trader Joe’s when they were living in Los Angeles where a shooter shot at police and took the store hostage, and this incident was followed by a mass shooting in Thousand Oaks and then Sherman Oaks in California. These made him think of the Australian government’s National Firearms Agreement which came into place in only 12 days directly after the Port Arthur Massacre leading to a national buyback of firearms by the government. The most horrific scene in all of ‘Nitram’, and the one that renders a depiction of the massacre itself unnecessary, is a scene where the Nitram character casually goes into a gun shop and buys $8,000 worth of automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons. The gun shop owner sees only the business he is making and when the Nitram character can’t produce a gun licence the gun shop owner is not perturbed, he only checks that the weapons are not registered. This is a powerful case for weapons not to be in the hands of those who should never have access to them.
Ultimately the film is a searing wake up call for all of us and our societies with permissive gun laws and this is shown by the film’s ending title card which informs the viewer that there are now more firearms in Australia than at the time of Port Arthur. It is also a clarion call for us to do better with those among us like Nitram after Bryant who do not fall into the typical, or the academically and emotionally intelligent, or are unable to really function in our societies independently without serious, targeted help. The film does not offer any simple solutions but makes a case for better attention.
In the fitness to stand trial report by forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen which was presented at Martin Byrant’s trial in November 1996, Mullen made a conclusion which he felt best fit why and how this awful tragedy occurred. This is also the best summary of Kurzel and Grant’s masterpiece, a masterpiece whose power comes from its sensitivity and deserves to be seen by as many people as possible both in Australia and the rest of the world where such gun violence and deaths continue to frequently occur; “The origins of this terrible tragedy are not to be found in a single dramatic and sufficient cause but in… a complex interaction between a number of abnormalities of mental state, personality deviations and a series of chance events, all finding a dreadful expression thanks to the availability of powerful weapons for killing.”
