On 28 April 1996, in Tasmania, Australia, a lone gunman killed 35 people and wounded another 23. The Port Arthur massacre led to sweeping gun reform across Australia, the effectiveness of which is now questioned by people for and against gun control. The gunman’s motivations are presumed to be a misappropriation of blame for family trauma and, as his lawyer recently claimed, to become notorious. The latter of these reasons would seem a definitive reason as to why a film about his story should not be made.
Australian director Justin Kurzel has made a career out of stories of horrific violence being committed by people whose mental deterioration is a cause or an effect of said brutality. His first feature, Snowtown, explores the case of Australia’s worst serial killers, severely impoverished and bigoted people whose killings were motivated by a delusional sense of vigilante justice. It’s a messy, unpleasant debut, one teeming with disgusting behaviour and distinctly exploitative in execution.
A decade on, Kurzel turns his attention to Port Arthur, showing the journey of the massacre’s perpetrator and delving into his turbulent mental condition. It’s ground Kurzel has trodden before, but four films later, he has the opportunity to showcase a more mature directorial voice, exploring the sensitive, distressing material in a way that demonstrates fully-formed storytelling skills and compassion for those affected by such a traumatic scar on his nation’s history.
Kurzel, it transpires, is not a filmmaker capable or interested in showcasing such a voice. The film we’re left with, Nitram, is at best surface-deep and at worst irresponsible.
There’s nothing wrong with Nitram’s performances. Caleb Landry Jones, credited as ‘Nitram,’ wears the irregular mannerisms of the future gunman naturally. His parents, played by Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia, have a visceral, quiet tension running through every line, as they try to suppress or dismiss the problems with Nitram’s wellbeing. It all feels like a wasted effort, however, with such obvious and simplistic writing and direction.
Screenwriter Shaun Grant, who also penned Snowtown, fills the script with darkly ironic lines that foreshadow the horrors that are yet to come. “I can’t keep my eye on you all the time,” his father tells him. In addition to this, Nitram’s clear behavioural issues are highlighted in obvious ways, and all these instances are supposed to be striking for an audience, supposed clues pointing towards his crimes that those around him can’t see.
But these moments all feel cheap, loaded with a perspective these people couldn’t possibly fathom at. Dramatic irony, the audience knowing what the characters don’t, is not a substitute for a conversation about what causes traumatic events. It seems that Kurzel and Grant are content with performing lip-service psychological analysis, investigating the motivation behind their country’s atrocity in the simplest way imaginable. They would rather cause an unpleasant stir in their audience’s stomach rather than engage in unimaginable, difficult questions.
Humanising such an appalling person isn’t inherently unethical. In fact, it engages with an important issue; that atrocities were committed by humans. Calling people ‘monsters’ is part-descriptor, part-distancing act, one that relieves us from the fact that a person, like us, committed these crimes, and it was human social and psychological factors that led to their actions, ones that are unsettling to confront.
But Kurzel and Grant spend so much time creating sympathy for Nitram, in the traumas that befall him, and the alienating, abusive ways he’s treated socially, and are seemingly disinterested in engaging with what it means to sympathise with people who commit monstrous acts. A few lines of post-film text engage with the genuinely confounding issues at play, not why someone committed the Port Arthur massacre, but what did a nation do afterwards?
Mass is also a 2021 film about a mass shooting. It sees two sets of parents, those of a victim and those of a perpetrator, sit in a back room of a church and try to reach some form of understanding of their impenetrable guilt, blame, and grief. It is a flawed film; as the debut of writer-director Fran Kranz, the weaknesses in the structure become apparent as the film progresses, and the dramatic execution can come across amateurish. But the ways it differs from Nitram make its strengths shine.
Mass is not based on any real tragedy, a decision that may appear to detach it from any grounded emotional context, but one that gives its characters freedom to speculate, insightfully or misguidedly, on why such events happen without the film acting irresponsibly. More importantly, its ensemble are not equipped to understand what makes shooters commit massacres; they are traumatized, grief-stricken people who feel compelled to explain something incomprehensible but lack the powers of articulation to do so. There is pathos in seeing ill-equipped people attempt to wrap their head around something monumental.
Unlike Mass, Nitram posits itself as an authority on what caused a tragedy, and the limits of Kurzel and Grant’s empathetic powers are highlighted tenfold. Mass proposes that we should focus on those people left broken by tragedies, and how the tortuous healing process proves how compassionate human beings can be. Nitram wants to poke at pain in incessantly hollow ways.
Critical response to Nitram has highlighted Kurzel’s restraint for not showing the murders that happened at Port Arthur. This choice is not commendable, but rather the bare minimum. Is this really all Kurzel has matured since Snowtown? Is not showing acts of brutal murder the only development we can see? Does he think that if victims of mass shootings saw his film, they wouldn’t be sick to their stomach? In all his and Grant’s research of the massacre, did they never internalise the fact that the gunman was obsessed with his own notoriety, and would be left satisfied with how his life is shown as a struggle worthy of sympathy?
Kurzel has no interest in the trauma of atrocities, he just has an adolescent fascination with abhorrent individuals, and lacks the storytelling talent to produce something other than vacant. In Nitram, no healing is offered to those affected, and the film is the final nail in the coffin for Kurzel’s stale vision.
