I don’t often present my thoughts in the first person when writing a review, but there is one moment in Justin Kurzel’s Nitram that affected me so deeply on a personal level that it completely overpowered my experience of the film up to that point, so I decided that keeping any pretence at critical distance was futile. Nitram systematically depicts the life of mass murderer Martin Bryant in the months before he massacred 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania in April 1996. It’s a sober, deliberately unspectacular character study of a damaged person with a startling central performance from Caleb Landry Jones. The obvious question is why a film like this is made in the first instance. Cinema should challenge and provoke of course, but it’s understandable that many will see in films like Nitram, Gus Van Sant‘s Elephant, or Paul Greengrass‘ 22 July atrocity being mined for entertainment. Nitram‘s announcement caused widespread disgust in the community of Port Arthur, who had no desire to see their wounds publicly examined.
This argument was very much at the forefront of my mind as I watched the film. I appreciated the strength of feeling of the people who couldn’t bear the thought of its existence, but I was determined to take Nitram on its merits as art. I admired the rigour of Kurzel’s approach. It is sparse, unadorned, and all the more disturbing for it. It is also the only way this subject matter could be presented and remain in any way respectful for the victims. Bryant’s name is avoided altogether. Landry Jones’ misfit is known solely as ‘Nitram’, a nickname he hated as it suggested he was backward. It’s probably done as tastefully as it could possibly be. However, as a Scottish viewer it’s impossible to watch without drawing parallels between Port Arthur and the Dunblane massacre, which took place a month earlier. Both happened in 1996, both were the work of a lone gunman, in both instances the perpetrator was a social outcast, and both led to a complete restructuring of gun laws in their respective countries. As much as I respected the film, and its attempt to make sense of an appalling act, I could easily imagine the response if a corresponding film about Dunblane was announced. A queasy prospect.
Then came the moment. Nitram happens upon a new report on Dunblane. Kurzel clearly posits this as a moment of a spark placed against touch paper, pivotal in his protagonist’s later actions. The camera switches to Nitram’s perspective as he watches the TV. That’s when I gasped. On screen was the real-life press conference the headmaster of Dunblane primary school, Ron Taylor, gave in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Taylor had also been the headmaster of the primary school I had attended between 1985-92 before he’d moved on to Dunblane. I hadn’t seen this footage in 26 years, and my stomach lurched in a way that I’ve never experienced in a film before and am not likely to since. Here was someone I remembered as a decent man, who somehow found the fortitude to face the scrutiny of the world as the figure of authority in a place that had witnessed something unspeakable; an event that he couldn’t even have fathomed as being possible, let alone taken steps to prevent. This was reality. And it brought the reality of the events Nitram depicts into painfully sharp focus.
On one level, I was uncomfortable about the footage of someone at the very worst moment of their life being used. On another level, this was the power of cinema as I’d never experienced it before. I was slightly disgusted by its inclusion as I marvelled at the audacity and the realisation that on a storytelling level it absolutely worked. We’ll never know if it was a genuine influence on Bryant’s actions, but it makes a sickly sense. You can argue it boils down a complicated sequences of factors – mental illness, parental failure, systematic failure on various institutional levels – into one overly-simple flashpoint. You can call it crass. You can call it blunt. You can call it irresponsible. It’s also incredibly powerful, and for all the misgivings I have about that moment on a personal level, I doubt anything I ever watch will have such an effect on me again.
Justin Kurzel is not a shrinking violet. His films have never shied away from exploring humanity’s darker aspects. It’s not even the first time he’s clawed at the most horrifying events in Australia’s recent past. His debut Snowtown was a gruesome account of the Snowtown murders that took place in South Australia in the ’90s. While it didn’t cause quite the same level of controversy as Nitram, there were still some who took viciously against it. Others put it in the same stylistic bracket as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Vengeance is Mine, or Man Bites Dog; films based on real events but with the armour of fiction. Such depictions are harder to dismiss when they’re played out as fact.
It is this matter-of-factness that really disturbs, and the inclusion of the Dunblane report is part of this. It is a horrid, destabilising reminder of the fragility of human life. In a title card at the end, we’re told that despite the laws brought into effect after Port Arthur, there are now more guns in Australia than there were in 1996. More than anything else, Nitram tells us that there could be another Bryant anywhere that is falling through the cracks. It isn’t a film that can be written off as trash or as cheap exploitation, although it can be argued that there are exploitative elements. It’s a film about violence that doesn’t show any. It’s sober in tone, but the response to it is anything but, and it’s been meticulously designed to elicit that response. It has moments of beauty, of possible redemption, and it has phenomenal performances from Landry Jones, Essie Davis, Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia.
Here’s the very core of it. Quite simply, we don’t want our monsters humanised. When there’s enough on communal plates with more nebulous horrors like two years of a global pandemic and the suddenly very real re-emergence of nuclear paranoia, we don’t want the threats against us to look like us. We don’t want to acknowledge that a human being can commit such atrocities. But the perpetrators of Port Arthur and Dunblane were human, and nothing more. Nitram reminds us almost far too strongly of that. It’s entirely valid to question why Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant chose that particular event to illustrate their point, and it’s understandable why the residents of Port Arthur have objected in the strongest possible terms. For me, as much as it makes me deeply uncomfortable to be reminded of my own tiny, tangential connection to probably the worst peacetime tragedy in modern British history, and I resent the filmmakers a little for their approach in achieving that, I can’t deny the craft of the film itself. I’ve rarely felt so poised between appreciation and condemnation. I kind of hate it. But I think it’s brilliant. What I can say is that it’s highly unlikely I will ever, ever watch it again.
Screening as part of Glasgow Film Festival 2022