It’s terrifying to raise children whom you can neither manage nor understand, and those unfathomable depths are plumbed by Nitram, director Justin Kurzel’s chilling fictionalized tale about the young man responsible for the 1996 Port Arthur mass shooting in Tasmania that killed 35 and wounded an additional 23. At the center of that nightmare is Nitram, whose moniker (with which schoolkids taunted him) comes from spelling the real-life culprit’s name backwards—a fitting bit of wordplay, given that Nitram seems to be moving in a wholly different direction than his compatriots. An unhinged individual as dangerous as he is unreadable, Nitram is the dark heart of this character study, and as brilliantly embodied by Caleb Landry Jones (in a performance that earned him the Best Actor award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), he’s an enigmatic loner whose head—per an early, telling image—is a swarm of flies.
In 1990s Australia, Nitram lives with his mother (Judy Davis) and father (Anthony LaPaglia), who don’t quite know how to handle their progeny. Following a non-fiction prologue in which an adolescent boy in a burn ward explains that he’ll keep playing with fire no matter the damage it’s already caused him, Nitram (March 30 in theaters, on demand, and on AMC+) introduces its protagonist setting off fireworks in his backyard, much to the irritation of a nearby neighbor. Wearing filthy overalls and with stringy long hair that hasn’t seen a comb or shampoo in weeks, Nitram is an out-of-sorts man-child. While glaring at him with steely eyes, his mother issues curt demands to her son. If Davis’ matriarch spies in Nitram an alien consciousness that can’t be fully grasped, and thus must be dealt with firmly, LaPaglia’s dad serves as the calming influence of the household, trying his best to keep the peace and, in doing so, maintain a relationship with a troubled boy about whom he cares deeply.
Nitram has no friends, social life or capacity for well-adjusted interaction with others; the best he can do, early on, is strike up an awkward exchange with a young woman on the beach, which ends abruptly when her boyfriend Jamie (Sean Keenan), a surfer, materializes and casually shoulders Nitram out of the picture by making out with his sweetheart. Becoming a surfer is one of Nitram’s numerous flights of fancy, although his world is transformed not in the ocean but on land, when he gets the idea to start a lawn-mowing service and swiftly stumbles upon the home of Helen (Essie Davis). Residing with her large collection of dogs in an expansive, dilapidated mansion, Helen gives Nitram a job, and rewards him by giving him a car (and the surfboard that his mom denied him). Before long, she’s also asking him to move into her abode, which seriously unnerves his mother, who views Helen as a threat and a fool who doesn’t know what she’s getting into—something she articulates during their hostile first meeting together at the venue that will ultimately serve as the site of Nitram’s crime.
Kurzel’s camera watches Nitram from a distance in order to highlight his disconnection—from others, and from himself—as well as in anxious close-ups that provide Jones with ample opportunity to express his character’s volatile, mysterious inner turmoil. There’s no doubt that Nitram is mentally ill, and yet the precise nature of his condition remains as opaque as the thoughts that run behind his often-indecipherable eyes and arouse his beguiling smiles. Even when he’s sharing a tender exchange with his father or enjoying a leisurely moment with the similarly not-altogether-there Helen, flickers of agitation remain ever-present, poised to ignite in unpredictable ways. He’s a live wire who might explode at any moment, and Jones—his body language slumped but nimble and purposeful, his expressions bold but hard to pin down—imagines him as a figure of mesmerizing confusion, unruliness, and disaffection.
Nitram is a wild card barely kept in check by his parents, so when tragedy strikes, he’s completely incapable of maintaining any semblance of equilibrium. The first of those misfortunes involves Helen, whose sad fate is the direct result of her imprudently trusting nature, and the second concerns LaPaglia’s dad, whose demise is precipitated by dashed dreams and then a depression that Nitram vainly attempts to batter out of his father with his fists. Worse, at the same time that Nitram’s universe begins to crumble, he’s also afforded an amazing measure of freedom—and wealth—that grants him the ability to do as he pleases. Consequently, when he determines that he can no longer live out his and Helen’s fantasy of visiting Los Angeles—this despite a visit to a travel agent in which he invites the saleswoman to join him on the trip—his mind invariably turns to his other abiding fixation: guns.
One need not be aware of the reality behind Kurzel’s fictional film to see where it’s headed; a few moments in Nitram’s company makes clear that nothing good can come of him and his inherently dysfunctional circumstances. Still, the director keeps things consistently on edge, courtesy of Nitram’s interior stew of bitterness, loneliness and disassociation, and also his rapport with his mom, here portrayed by Davis as a stern woman whose feelings for her son are an irreconcilable clash of love, pity and fear, the last of which is born from her suspicion that Nitram, no matter the public face he presents, doesn’t think or feel as most others do. It’s in her quiet horror that Nitram situates its audience: clueless about what truly drives Nitram, and therefore unprepared for his sudden, irrevocable actions.
As a coda explains, the events which inspired Nitram led to sweeping anti-gun legislation whose immediate impact seems to have dissipated; today, Australia boasts more firearms than it did in 1996. It’s a closing note that merely accentuates the anguish of Kurzel’s film, whose haunting power is epitomized by the sight of Nitram staring at himself in a bedroom mirror—and then kissing his reflection—with a look that suggests both a desperate desire to love himself, and a realization that he doesn’t recognize, or comprehend, the person standing before him.
