The dark underbelly of sun-kissed Australia is once again highlighted in the fifth feature from director Justin Kurzel. His last effort, True History Of The Kelly Gang, looked at the country’s legendary outlaw Ned Kelly, while with its suburban setting and true-crime origins, Nitram (pronounced Nit-ram, if you’re wondering) covers similar territory to Kurzel’s debut Snowtown, a film that felt almost relentlessly chilling. His latest adopts a very different tack.

Working from a screenplay by regular collaborator Shaun Grant, Kurzel looks at events preceding the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, which remains the worst crime in modern Australian history to be committed by an individual. Provocatively, things are largely seen through the eyes of the massacre’s perpetrator Martin Bryant, known here by his much-hated childhood nickname of Nitram (his name spelt backwards) who, rather than being portrayed as a shadowy and monstrous figure, is someone the film is interested in truly knowing: the good, the bad and the very, very ugly.

Nitram is played in brilliant yet unshowy fashion by the American actor Caleb Landry Jones, who makes a decent fist of the accent too and was rewarded with Best Actor at Cannes 2021 for his efforts. With his head lolling and hair hanging, he often sports the sulky sneer of a petulant toddler or angsty teen despite being in his twenties, possessing a grungy Kurt Cobain-ness about him. Jones is supported terrifically by Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia as his exasperated mum and soft-hearted but increasingly depressed dad, and by Essie Davis (who also happens to be Kurzel’s wife) playing a reclusive and eccentric heiress who Nitram befriends and moves in with.

The film doesn’t shy from the gorgeousness of its backdrop, presenting the area’s radiance in marked contrast to Nitram’s spiralling behaviour and increasingly disturbed psyche; Kurzel is a resident of Tasmania and is as in love with its beauty as he is repelled by its horrors. As Nitram goes from moderately dangerous (playing recklessly with fireworks which he uses to try and impress kids) to someone fascinated by guns, the way he gambols about without a care for consequences morphs from childlike to sinister in a film that specialises in creeping, rather than solidly oppressive, unease. 

Given his recent forays into spectacle-driven moviemaking (2015’s magnificent but financially unsuccessful Macbeth and the more expensive 2016 flop Assassin’s Creed), there’s something immensely satisfying about seeing Kurzel take on something so modestly scaled and interrogatory. Although the director doesn’t try to absolve Nitram of responsibility by painting his life as a never-ending stream of misery, the attempts to understand him result in a clearly compassionate portrayal of a serial killer that has already proven controversial, especially in Australia.

For those who are grieving, this will, no doubt, feel like too much too soon and, honestly, who can blame them. But it’s one of the responsibilities of artforms to confront truths that we may be unable or unwilling to recognise and perhaps shape them into something to learn from. Kurzel’s insight here is admirable. Nitram is presented as intellectually disabled and lacking in impulse control; through his mother’s recollections, the film suggests that he may have been wired wrong, yet it has much more to say. It illustrates his cruel treatment at the hands of others (which pushes him to the peripheries of society), the twin tragedies that befall him, the paltry help and support received by his family and, most devastatingly and damningly, Australia’s appalling gun-control regulations.

It was the latter and the lack of properly enforced changes in the years that followed which prompted screenwriter Grant to tell the story from Nitram’s perspective; he wanted audiences to ‘sit with a character who clearly should not have access to firearms and watch as they are so easily granted access to them’. With such crimes unfortunately not as rare as they should be, particularly in the US, this is a film that contains some important lessons. Let’s hope those who most need to hear them sit up and listen.

Nitram is in cinemas from Friday 1 July.