Written by: Shaun Grant / Directed by Justin Kurzel / Distributed in the UK by Picturehouse Entertainment / Running Time: 112 Minutes
7th July 2022
Review by Rob Deb. Read more of Rob's review's here.
The Pitch: Living a life of isolation and frustration, a young man develops an unexpected friendship with a reclusive heiress. When that relationship meets its tragic end, his loneliness and anger culminate into the most nihilistic and heinous of acts.
Content Warning: Nitram is a film that deals with a difficult subject, one that given recent events is fresh in many people's minds. Please bear this in mind before reading the review. Rob saw the film at Picturehouse Cinemas and for context, we've reprinted director Justin Kurzel's letter to Picturehouse members here:
Dear Picturehouse Members,
I have lived in Tasmania for the last four years where my wife and I have decided to bring up our daughters. We have done this because there is no more beautiful place than this land and people. There is a spirit and resilience unlike any other. In winter, the storms from the Antarctic batter the coasts and in a strange way, Tasmania comes alive with energy, a curiosity, and a need to explore, to understand this place and its past.
Its past has ghosts, terrible unresolved tragedies, which haunt and have settled like a constant fog over its exquisite beauty. This reflection is complex and cautious; there are things best not talked about, a darkness to evade. The shadows flicker, but they mostly sit in blackness.
Shaun Grant's script for Nitram came from those shadows. It was unexpected and revealing in its honesty and genuine desire to understand and ask questions about one of the darkest chapters in Australian history, the 1996 Port Arthur shootings.
The forensic unwrapping of the character in the weeks leading up to the shootings was as vivid as it was elusive, in that it reached beyond the monster echoes and confronted me with someone who I felt I had known, walked past, ignored, would see but then forget.
The portrait he invented, the family he created, and the street they lived on all felt conversant and familiar. This step-by-step unpeeling of a character, their dismantling and isolation, dared me to consider how someone could evolve into a leviathan. When that person was at their most dangerous and volatile, how were they able to make the worst choices imaginable?
Since my first film Snowtown, I have been interested in why these young men search for answers in such extreme violence. Is there a cultural void, which starves these human beings of a tribe, an absence of belonging? When there is no church, no sense of origin, and no connection to land and country, what becomes their compass, what corrupts them towards this apathetic and senseless need to destroy life?
As filmmakers, we have tried to tread gently. I am conscious that this film is speaking to an event in time, which we would rather look past. The profound pain runs deep. Forgetting helps us survive – but freedom comes from memory. I have sought to reach into the darkness to find a truth and to understand the unimaginable. There are no answers, but the legacy of Port Arthur is our albatross around our necks; it is part of our history, and it warns the future of its perils.
– Justin Kurzel, director
The Review:
I knew 'Martin', - someone just like him, at least - he was a foster kid at our school. I met him while I had a brief stint in the special needs department in secondary school in ‘87. Mum interjected, so I wasn't there long before I was put back in the mainstream. I had spoken to Martin about A Nightmare on Elm Street. And he knew someone at the foster home who could get me a Krueger Glove. I thought that would be awesome and saved up £5 of pocket money ( I was spoiled that way by 80’s standards). I ended up outside Bejams with £5 and meeting him and a kid who seemed huge but was probably about 17 to my 11-year-old self. He pulled out this awful rusty set of brass badly stamped onto a white cloth glove that would probably slice the back of my hand just putting it on. I was shocked. I was expecting a plastic toy from the states like I had seen the fat boys play with…
I screamed, not shouted, screamed, NO! He sneered at me. “Why?”
I said “Because you could hurt someone with that.”
Nitram doesn't have that awareness. The film is provisionally based on real events in the mid-’90s but could just easily be yesterday. As I type this (July 4th) there is a Gunman at large in Chicago with a description that is almost cliche “white, long hair, and a coat”. What Nitram, A nickname as we barely hear him called Martin, has from the outset is impulse issues, a petulant tendency, and a lack of boundaries and communication skills. We are introduced to him in his home, setting off fireworks with despairing hard-working blue-collar parents. They are tired and look haggard through the care.We also get glimpses of how his undisclosed condition is treated or neglected and that is the core of the story. Visiting their doctor his mother asks for more anti-depressants as “they help”. “ They help who? Him or you?” the doctor asks. To which she replies. “Both”.
Caleb Landry Jones conveys the sweetness, blasé manner, and enthusiasm of Nitram
It's a compelling film as we realise his family and their ambitions of owning a B and B belie some darker hints at their mental health and past. This is a film where neglect and decay seem to pervade the entire town Nitram inhabits. There is a point where his father, who is depicted as so warming, initially falls into his stupor of depression. Nitram comes over and his solution to the problem is something shocking and in its way hysterical, yet one can't help but feel if his lack of faculties is something natural or nurtured as his violence is ‘learned’. Beat for beat, there is an element where Nitram’s story could have been an archetypal Pauly Shore or Adam Sandler movie. ‘Billy Madison given a brutalist reboot: 'Irresponsible man child befriends reclusive cat lady heiress who buys him loads of cool stuff he has fun with!' But this is a world of consequence and as much as Caleb Landry Jones conveys the sweetness, blasé manner, and enthusiasm of Nitram. He also gets the threat, the disaffection, and the very real danger of adult tantrums that stem from him.
You see the destination, but like a railway track, you have no choice but to go along with the glib devastation
Events spiral around Nitram but there seems to be no rudder to get him back on track. Everyone he meets is lost in their own way. As he fails to make friends and creates increasingly extreme situations; it's the small town neglect that makes you wonder about the lack of authority as his actions become increasingly reckless yet unflagged. By the end of the film. You see the destination, but like a railway track, you have no choice but to go along with the glib devastation and will be moved by the hurt caused. The film offers no sermon or solution or magic pill for the ills in Nitram's world. Nor does it shy from depicting his schemes. But the final coda at the end explains the increase and importance of gun control in this world. It's a genuine set of characters in a world that is adrift. Yet the ease of firearm access makes it a world of casual violence and so fragile it's not even noticeable.
As I left the cinema a couple was behind me. The lady turned to her boyfriend and said “what a slob”. He agreed. “I blame the mother”. I think it was the access to heavy and superior firearms myself. And I made a point of putting my jeans in the wash as walking away I realised how many days it was since I'd washed them last. This film was intense and you should see it as soon as you can.