Friday 1 July 2022 07:09 AM BRIAN VINER reviews Nitram: A brilliant study of Australian mass shooter trends now
Nitram (15, 112 mins)
Rating: 
Verdict: Hugely powerful
The Princess (12, 109 mins)
Rating: 
Verdict: Diana's story, astutely told
The Australian director Justin Kurzel is a classy operator behind the camera, and his wife Essie Davis is generally terrific in front of it. The thunderously powerful and thought-provoking Nitram sees both at the absolute top of their game.
But it was Caleb Landry Jones who deservedly took the laurels at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, winning the Best Actor prize for his stunning performance in what is, once you’ve worked out how, the title role.
Nitram tells the story of Martin Bryant, who is serving 35 life sentences concurrently: one for every person he shot dead on a murderous rampage in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in April 1996.
The more observant of you will have noticed that Nitram spells Martin backwards. I saw the film with my wife, who quietly pointed this out to me about 20 minutes in. Being slower on the uptake, I hadn’t made the connection myself; though she did later admit that she processed it only because at primary school in Yorkshire some 50 years ago, she and her classmates derived so much pleasure from inverting the name of their friend Martin Parkinson.
Nitram tells the story of Martin Bryant, who is serving 35 life sentences concurrently: one for every person he shot dead on a murderous rampage in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in April 1996
In this case, Nitram has a double relevance. It becomes clear that during his own schooldays it was used against Bryant as a taunt, presumably because he was perceived as backwards.
More significantly, he is never otherwise referred to by name; not by his parents (Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia, also both on top form), nor even in the film’s closing captions, which detail his heinous killing spree and the immediate gun-control legislation passed by the Australian government.
Evidently, the excellent screenplay by Shaun Grant — who worked with Kurzel on Snowtown (2011) and True History Of The Kelly Gang (2019) — respects the reluctance in Tasmania, where his crimes cast the longest of shadows, to humanise Bryant by mentioning his name.
But of course the film does humanise him and has duly been massively controversial down there. One man who survived his rampage has declared that 35 people ‘didn’t die just to offer Americans a salutary tale about gun control’. It’s easy to understand his anger. Dramatising the Dunblane massacre would have the same effect here.
All that said, this seems to me a compellingly timely film, which would be less important if it were less brilliantly done. But it really is superbly acted, written and directed, offering a chilling look at how his family and society at large failed to acknowledge the danger posed by a disturbed, unpredictable young man (aged 28 at the time of the killings) who had a lifelong fascination with fireworks and, alarmingly, was able to stroll out of a gun store with enough weapons to sustain a medium-sized militia.
Whatever the ethics of telling Bryant’s story on screen, the film plainly sends a message to all those Americans who cherish their right to bear as many arms as they want
Whatever the ethics of telling Bryant’s story on screen, the film plainly sends a message to all those Americans who cherish their right to bear as many arms as they want, ripping apart the skewed logic of their tired mantra: ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’
As for how this killer could afford his deadly arsenal, Nitram chronicles the bizarre friendship he struck up with a wealthy eccentric, Helen (Essie Davis, truly sensational). She died in a road accident but left him more than enough money to carry out his slaughter (which incidentally goes unseen . . . indeed, the film is all
