Nitram

Directed by Justin Kurzel

Running time: 1hr50 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Caleb Landry-Jones stars in Nitram

Caleb Landry-Jones’ performance in Nitram, as an unlikeable outsider simmering with sadness and anger, is extraordinary. He doesn’t fall into the trap of making the mass killer that he plays here charismatic or sexy, and nor does he give us an obviously over-the-top grotesque. There is clearly something not quite right about him, something off about the way he interacts with people. This “off” feeling gathers and throbs like an incipient migraine, as the film progresses towards its grim finale.

Sensitive to the fact that Nitram is based on one of the worst mass killings in Australia’s history, those tragic events are thankfully not played out as a narratively attractive dramatic climax, but nor are they tastefully elided — this is a tough thing to get right, but balanced with care here.

Of course, filmmakers wouldn’t need to consider how best to portray the murders of dozens of innocent victims if they didn’t keep choosing to make films about these kinds of events. Some feel that cinema’s fixation on murder is an unhealthy one. It’s true that if what we mean by representation is reflecting a fair and proportionate mix of humanity as it actually exists, then murderers are a category of human being that is absolutely overrepresented onscreen. But I think a fair chunk of art functions a bit like the news: it tells us about the outliers, the exceptions. The news does not report on all the airplanes that made it safely to their destination, it reports on the exceptions. I think this is where cinema’s fascination with killers comes from: rightly or wrongly, we want to know how this happened, what went wrong.

With a film like Nitram — a devastating and compelling piece of cinema — we are shown how this could happen. Caleb Landry-Jones’ performance is, above all else, plausible.

NITRAM (2021) Written by Shaun Grant | Shot by Germain McMicking | Edited by Nick Fenton