Director Justin Kurzel shies away from depicting the Port Arthur massacre itself but outstanding performances mean it’s still a highly unsettling story
Australian director Justin Kurzel has made his most purely disturbing film since his debut Snowtown in 2011. Like that film, Nitram is based on a real-life case of murder and family dysfunction (which incidentally also applies to Kurzel’s version of Macbeth). And he has four outstanding performances from Judy Davis, Essie Davis, Anthony LaPaglia and Caleb Landry Jones.
The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 was perpetrated by a violently disturbed young man, Martin Bryant, who shot and killed 35 people at a Tasmanian tourist site with a semi-automatic rifle bought legally; he was apparently inspired by the UK’s Dunblane massacre one month earlier. The
Australian government took immediate steps to limit the sales of weaponry. Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant have dramatised Bryant’s own deeply disturbed home and family environment and the utterly bizarre twists that his life had taken in the time leading up to the
shooting. His pre-murder existence has a stranger-than-fiction quality that would be worthy of feature film treatment, even if the killings had never happened.