Rating: MA15+ - Strong themes

Release date: September 30

Runtime: 112 mins

Director: Justin Kurzel

Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Essie Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Judy Davis

Nitram lives with his mother and father in suburban Australia in the Mid 1990s. He lives a life of isolation and frustration at never being able to fit in. That is until he unexpectedly finds a close friend in a reclusive heiress, Helen. However when that friendship meets its tragic end, and Nitram’s loneliness and anger grow, he begins a slow descent into a nightmare that culminates in the most nihilistic and heinous of acts.

Director’s Statement – JUSTIN KURZEL

I have lived in Tasmania for the last four years where my wife and I have decided to bring up our daughters.We have done this because there is no more beautiful place than this land and people. There is a spirit here and resilience unlike any other. In winter the storms from the Antarctic batter the coasts, in a strange way Tasmania comes alive with energy, a curiosity, a need to explore, to understand this place and its past.

Its past has ghosts, terrible unresolved tragedies, which haunt and have settled like a constant fog over its exquisite beauty. This reflection is complex and cautious; there are things best not talked about, a darkness to evade. The shadows flicker, but they mostly sit in blackness.

Shaun Grants script NITRAM came from those shadows. It was unexpected and revealing in its honesty and genuine desire to understand and ask questions about one of the darkest chapters in Australian history, the 1996 Port Arthur Mass Shooting.

The forensic unpeeling of the character in the weeks leading up to the shooting was so authentic that it reached beyond the monster echo’s and confronted me with someone who I felt I had known, walked past, ignored, would see but then forget.

The portrait he invented, the family he created, the street they lived on all felt conversant and familiar. This step-by-step unpeeling of a character, their dismantling and isolation dared me to consider how someone could evolve into a leviathan. When that person was at their most dangerous and volatile how were they able to make the worst choices imaginable.

The moment we feel the most unsure and uncertain of Nitram is the moment that he buys his first guns. The horror of this scene spoke more to me about gun reform than any statistic or opinion piece. It crystalized the tragedy in a way, which made me clearly see the failings of the past, how gun laws could easily be exploited by the most vulnerable and dangerous.

Since my first film SNOWTOWN I have been interested in why these young men search for answers in such extreme violence. Is there a cultural void, which starves these men of a tribe, an absence of belonging?

When there is no church, no sense of origin, no connection to land and country, what becomes their compass, what corrupts them towards this apathetic and senseless need to destroy life?

As filmmakers we have tried to tread gently. I am conscious that this film is speaking to an event in time, which we would rather look past. The pain runs deep. Forgetting helps us survive but freedom comes from memory. I have tried to reach into the darkness to find a truth and to understand the unimaginable. There are no answers, but the legacy of Port Arthur is our albatross, it is part of our history and it warns the future of its perils.