Items of the first unsociableness – Newspaper Kommersant No. 218 (7419) dated 11/24/2022

Australian director Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram” comes out in theaters – another scary story of a criminal and a crime in his filmography. Caleb Landry Jones, who played the title role, won the 2021 Cannes Film Festival award for her. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

The film, based on real events, begins with mockumentary footage. A reporter from a local television channel in Tasmania (an Australian state located on an island south of the mainland) comes to a hospital room where children with burns are lying. They suffered from a careless game with fire – they blew up firecrackers in the house, set up dangerous experiments – and concluded that this was not worth doing. Except for ten-or twelve-year-old Nitram at that time: when asked by a journalist, he answers that he will not throw firecrackers.

And he really continues to set fireworks in the yard, even turning into a thirty-year-old healthy kid with unwashed blond hair and an extinct look (Caleb Landry Jones). Neighbors yell, indignant at the noise, the father (Anthony LaPaglia) tries to gently but persistently call his son to order, the stamp of martyr patience froze on the face of the mother (Judy Davis). Nitram (in fact, this is the nickname that the guy was awarded at school, and his real name will not sound in the film) remained a difficult child who does not understand the connection between actions and their consequences, does not have an emotional and verbal apparatus for interacting with others people. His mood swings are kept under control with medication, but when the doctor suggests trying another therapy, the mother brushes off—as well as questions about her own condition.

The tragedy of the Nitrama family is the tragedy of three people, each of whom is locked in his own separate misfortune, unable to connect with each other, and not knowing how to do this. The young man hangs around the neighborhood, an eyesore to his neighbors, tries to earn money by mowing lawns, getting mostly refusals, and dreams of riding a board with a company of local surfers, but those, beautiful and free as gods, of course, meet him with ridicule. His mother built a wall between herself and her son, turning to him only for everyday reasons: change dirty pants, wash your hair, comb your hair, clean up. She certainly loves her child, and in a few short episodes it breaks out, but, trying to protect this love, hides it as deep as possible. The father sees salvation for all of them in buying a new house on the shore of a beautiful bay and setting up a guest house there for tourists – and when this dream collapses, the family breaks up completely.

The fourth in this company, united by total loneliness, is Helen (Essie Davis), who lives nearby, is the same, in the opinion of others, sparse as Nitram. But Helen has money: she lives in a huge house in the company of a cat and half a dozen dogs, wears furs and can afford to buy a new car just because she wanted to. She welcomes a strange guy who seems to have a friend for the first time in his life, but their relationship, which causes anxiety and suspicion in Nitram’s mother, who does not understand what the strange rich woman needed from her son, ends as suddenly as it began.

Even if you do not know that the film was based on an attempt to reconstruct the background of the most massacre in the history of Australia (it happened in 1996 in Port Arthur, when a certain Martin Bryant killed 35 people and injured 23 more, receiving 35 life sentences without the right to early release), from the first frames it is impossible not to feel the slow approach of inevitable disaster. It seems to suck the air and light out of even the most harmless at first glance episodes, despite the beautiful views of nature that alternate here with pictures of dreary abandoned wastelands, and causes a pulling feeling of horror, although we don’t seem to be watching horror.

This ability to create mental and physical discomfort in the audience is typical of Justin Kurzel, starting with his feature debut Snow City (2010) about serial killer John Bunting. It leaked into both his version of Macbeth (2015) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), about another famous Australian outlaw. The legendary mobster, about whom the folk ballads are composed, and the loner from Tasmania with untreated mental illness seem to be terribly far apart, but, according to Kurzel, both of them were the product of a dysfunctional family, society’s indifference to those who do not fit into its standards, and the normalization of violence: thus, Nitram finds it easier to buy a whole arsenal than to surf. And although the end credits report that after the tragedy in Port Arthur, gun laws in Australia were changed, this information no longer brings reassurance.