Streamlined | Nitram: The making of a mass shooter

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There is an unsettling sequence of events in Justin Kurzel’s new psychological drama Nitram, where the maladjusted young man of the title visits a local gun shop in Tasmania. He’s got no firearms license. Hell, he doesn’t even have a driver’s license. “No dramas,” the salesman assures him as long as he has got the cash. Indeed, Nitram has a whole duffel bag of it, which he uses to purchase a semi-automatic rifle and a shotgun. The salesman is happy to throw in a few complementary boxes of ammo. While amassing his arsenal, he watches a news report about “a misfit, a loner, an oddball, a weirdo” who killed 16 pupils and a teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. “Evil visited us yesterday and we don’t know why,” says a police officer in the press conference. “We don’t understand it. And I guess we never will.” It is the spark that lights the fire, as Nitram makes a trip to a second-hand dealer — a father of four children — to buy a couple more semi-automatic rifles. No license. No background checks. No drama.

Until 35 people were shot dead and 23 others were injured in what came to be known as the Port Arthur massacre, Australia’s deadliest lone-gunman mass shooting.

The massacre isn’t depicted but kept off screen. For the horror of the aforementioned sequence of events lies as much in the ease with which a young man was able to purchase the weapons to pull off such a wholesale slaughter. With mass shootings in the US closing in on 300 just this year and the futile debate over gun control back in the media spotlight, watching Nitram, a lingering unease grips the edges of our minds. It’s why Kurtzel’s portrait of a mass murderer from 1996 feels like a story still in progress. In the wake of the Dunblane and Port Arthur massacres, firearm restrictions were swiftly enforced in the UK and Australia. To do likewise in the US, one needs to convince every Second Amendment-loving American and a powerful gun lobby movement that the fundamental human right to life is more important than the right to bear firearms. It is horrifying to think that each mass shooting and the victims do little but add to the statistics of a continuing failure of public policy.

What drives men to commit acts of unimaginable violence has been a career-long interrogation for Kurzel and his screenwriter Shaun Grant. Their debut feature, Snowtown, was a grim portrait of homophobia manifesting as vigilantism. Their last feature, True History of the Kelly Gang, queered the legend of an unhinged 19th century outlaw from the outback. With Nitram, the duo gives us a bruising character study of a killer, maintaining an observational distance and letting the quiet dread of inevitability act as its gathering force.

Caleb Landry Jones is riveting as the killer, who is never mentioned by his real name: Martin Bryant. Nitram is his first name spelt backwards, a possible play on nit or nitwit, a nickname dubbed by mean schoolmates. Jones cuts an inscrutable rather than pitiable figure with behavioural disorders. Hiding behind the unkempt blonde hair is a lonely, asocial and restless young man. The self-knowledge of his mental illness and how others treat him as a result of it feed into his everyday anguish. He lives with his parents in Port Arthur and takes up odd jobs like lawn-mowing in the neighbourhood to keep himself busy. Germain McMicking’s handheld camera follows Nitram from a close distance, capturing his sense of alienation as he navigates a world he can’t figure out how to fit in. A steady sense of trepidation builds with Jed Kurzel’s score. Or each time Nitram uses an air rifle for target practice. When the shootings begin, Kurtzel doesn’t let the camera leave Nitram’s car. It stays behind, as we hear the sounds of gunfire in the distance and out of frame. When Nitram enters the Port Arthur site, the scene cuts as soon as he takes out his rifle, unwilling to exploit the tragedy for cheap thrills.

This is a film whose aim is not to exploit a tragedy or let the killer off the hook, but to step back and identify possible seeds, indications and episodes that made a seemingly unthinkable act of evil possible. Therein lies cautionary lessons to possibly prevent future tragedies. Kurzel deftly juggles psychological insight with a retracing of the last months into the making of a killer. Rather than explain away his pathology by building a bridge straight from his mental health issues to his act of terror, it speculates a commingling of a variety of factors/failures (from the familial to the institutional) led Nitram to do what he did. We see a young man struggling to fit in with his peers, a broken healthcare system that prescribes antidepressants without therapy, and a country with way too lax gun laws.

Whenever the question is raised about how such tragedies could have been prevented, an argument that often emerges is the accountability of the parents for the crimes of the children. The public is often quick to blame the family and the upbringing of mass shooters. Kurzel is a little more heedful, as he shows an exhausted pair struggling to raise a waspish, volatile manchild prone to tantrums. Judy Davis plays the mother with a steely-eyed coldness that belies her love for Nitram. As the father, Anthony LaPaglia plays a man more willing to humour his son, hoping a relocation to a country farm could do them all a world of good. Despite the conflicting parenting styles, what becomes clear is Nitram didn’t have a troubled upbringing at least at home. In one chilling scene, Nitram repeatedly pummel his depressed, sofa-ridden father in the head till he wakes up. His mother, fallen into a helpless stupor, can only watch on.

The film opens with a news report of children hospitalised after firework accidents. One of the young boys interviewed admits he has learnt his lesson. Another, lying in a hospital bed, too admits likewise, but also smilingly declares he will still play with them. The young boy is none other than Nitram. And it’s how we first meet Jones’ character: bursting fireworks in the yard over the angry cries of the neighbours. When his mother asks his father to confiscate them, his father responds, “It’s not doing any harm.” Given the tragedy to come, those words carry an ominous ring in the minds of the viewers.

Fortunes turn for Nitram when he meets Helen (Essie Davis), a lonely middle-aged heiress who hires him to walk her dozen or so dogs. In time, he becomes a stray in her pack too, as she offers him sanctuary in her crumbling but welcoming mansion. It’s a home away from home where music always plays, with Helen and Nitram bonding over Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Their relationship is no doubt a strange one. As Nitram’s mother questions Helen, “Which is he? A husband or a son?” The cold rigour of Nitram’s mom vs the warm solace of Helen represent a study in contrasts. Only, fortunes turn again. This time for the worse, as tragedy strikes, setting Nitram on a path of no return.

At once terrifyingly unhinged and finely modulated, Jones guides us down the rabbit hole of Nitram’s anger and resentment in measured steps. If his eyes are often hidden behind his long blonde hair, it is to lend this carefully constructed character study a degree of opacity. In the odd close-up, we come face to face with a force that can neither be tamed nor tempered. Kurzel doesn’t put too fine a point on any one reason as to why the tragedy happened. Though we would all love a simplistic “What single factor caused this?” explanation, Nitram offers a sobering reminder about the often-unknowable nature of evil.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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