NITRAM. Dramatically Powerful and Piercingly Cold

Nitram, Nitram. Martin, Martin. From an early age the boy was a serious disciplinary problem. A fascination with fireworks that ended in a painful burn did not prompt even a shred of reflection. The moment he left the hospital, he immediately longed again for fire and the thunder that came with it. At school he was bullied, seen as a loner and a freak. His name, mockingly pronounced backwards, was meant to brand him as someone who didn’t belong to the class clique. Calming medications work only superficially and temporarily. His mother grows increasingly impatient and treats him with mounting coldness. A helpless father keeps trying to offer warmth, interest, and affection. This is how, before our very eyes, a real monster takes shape.

It’s a spoiler and not a spoiler at the same time. In Nitram, Justin Kurzel tells the story of what preceded the 1996 shooting in Port Arthur massacre. The director adopts a completely different perspective than Gus Van Sant did in Elephant or Denis Villeneuve in Polytechnique. Those films offered precise reconstructions of the events themselves—step by step, shot by shot, victim by victim. Here, Kurzel is interested in the formation of a psychopath’s mind. He wants to understand that threshold moment when Martin becomes capable of pointing a gun at an innocent person and pulling the trigger. It’s shattering. Surrounded by the darkness of a movie theater, you will feel it yourselves—deep in your bones, under your skin.

Nitram is a two-hour tug-of-war over an abyss. Kurzel slowly ratchets up tension and emotional weight, searching for the critical point—the moment when Martin (a breakthrough performance by Caleb Landry Jones) will implode from within. Verbal skirmishes with his mother (Judy Davis), harmless target practice with cans in the backyard, the disappointment of a failed attempt to pick up a girl on the coast. Insecure and withdrawn, Martin nonetheless likes to posture as a macho. He doesn’t have a driver’s license, yet behind the wheel he craves risk. He can’t swim, but he straps a surfboard to the roof of his car. He calls himself a “businessman” while mowing people’s lawns.

Martin sees himself in inflated terms and sets the bar very high. That ego-building is hardly helped by the fact that before he can even speak to someone, he is met with the slam of a door violently shut in his face. He wants so much from life—and receives such paltry scraps.

A counterpoint to Martin’s endless string of failures is his fruitful yet bizarre relationship with Helen (Essie Davis), an eccentric and wealthy recluse living with a dozen dogs and dozens of cats. Apart from his father (Anthony LaPaglia), she is the only person with whom Martin forms a lasting thread of understanding and emotional connection. Their relationship carries an erotic undertone—though the protagonist seems largely incapable of such feelings—and constantly hovers between friendship, partnership, or a mother–son dynamic. Martin does not parasite off Helen’s wealth, yet he is convinced she will give him everything, that what belongs to her also belongs to him.

Nitram’s success lies in its tonal balance. Aside from a striking finale, there are no exaggerated extremes—only attitudes that signal psychological disarray. There is no parental pathology, but clear failures of upbringing. There is no overt brutality, yet somewhere in the background a ticking bomb can be heard. For Kurzel, Martin is, on some level, a victim who did not receive the necessary help in time—from parents, teachers, psychiatrists. The eruption of rage is not caused by one specific event, but by a weave of smaller failures and several missed chances.

Nitram is dramatically powerful. Nitram is existentially sad. Nitram is piercingly cold. Nitram sustains an uncomfortable sense of helplessness throughout. These are qualities usually reserved for top-tier cinematic thrillers.