Nitram review: Port Arthur movie should make you physically nauseous

Deeply unsettling, there will be many Australians who will choose to not see this film out of principle. Those that do will be confronted with a strong perspective.

There will be plenty of Australians who will decide they won’t watch Nitram – and they’ll have valid and understandable reasons for that choice.

A difficult and harrowing piece of cinema, Nitram asks audiences to confront one of the darkest moments in Australian history, the Port Arthur massacre in which a gunman killed 35 people.

The criticisms against the project – and any dramatisation involving the gunman – are grounded in the idea that the form itself glorifies the subject, or that it’s cruel to make victims relive incomprehensible suffering.

Those concerns come from a decent and compassionate place. And there is great sensitivity around that – the film was shot in Victoria, not Tasmania, the gunman is never named, while there are limited screenings in the Apple Isle, and without promotion.

But there have been previous works, including Paul Greengrass’s July 22, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and the dozens of films that have captured the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, that have had to contend with the same issues, and also faced similar backlash.

It’s not the job of artists to explore these awful things, but it is the prerogative – and through art, there can be truth if not always fact. For the wider community – the audience – there is great value in that art.

Caleb Landry-Jones in Nitram. Picture: Madman Entertainment

When horrendous acts are committed by humans, there is a natural desire to understand, even as some would argue that you can never make sense of the senseless.

But to cast people such as the Port Arthur gunman as not human – and never was human – is dangerous. To pretend that awful beings somehow exist outside of their context is to find solace in denial without confronting a larger truth.

Nitram, directed by Justin Kurzel from a screenplay by Shaun Grant, doesn’t offer up an excuse or a psychological profile for the gunman’s acts, but it does – to an extent – contextualise them within a family and social structure that is very real, very human and very flawed.

As portrayed by American actor Caleb Landry Jones, there is an emptiness and a chilling guilelessness to the gunman, especially in the first half of the film as he moves from his childhood home into that of a new, older friend Helen (Essie Davis), another outsider.

On a technical level, Kurzel’s film is highly accomplished. The performances are phenomenal, from Landry Jones, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes for his unsettling role, to Essie Davis’s warm, Gilbert and Sullivan-loving millionaire recluse.

While Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia are compassionate as the gunman’s parents, desperate and curt, loving and shamed.

Essie Davis as Helen. Picture: Madman Entertainment

The visceral tension of Nitram is sustained because you know how this story ends – even though the filmmakers have not shown the massacre itself or the offsite killings immediately prior to it.

More than most films, Nitram is a story of two halves, and it’s in that tonal transition into the escalating second half in which the purpose of Kurzel’s movie becomes clear.

Nitram has a strong perspective as an anti-gun film, a real-life parable of what happens when you let dangerous individuals have access to mass destruction weapons.

The dissonant sounds of wasps buzzing at the beginning of the movie is now the bone-chilling, repetitive din of live rounds during target shooting with assault weapons. A prolonged, matter-of-fact scene in a gunshop is enough to make you physically nauseous.

And it should make you physically nauseous because that scenario, both mundane and extraordinary at the same time, should never be.

Nitram doesn’t pretend it’s the be-all and end-all of the Port Arthur massacre or the gunman, but it’s a piece of art that wants to try and understand this past that Australia has to own, and how it connects to the present and where we go from here with this country’s softening gun laws.

That’s the real power of Nitram, to confront and challenge. That’s the real power of art.

Rating: 4/5

Nitram is in select cinemas now and will stream on Stan from November 24

Originally published as Nitram review: Port Arthur movie should make you physically nauseous