Nitram

The depressing slew of recent headlines telling of atrocities perpetrated by angry young men with automatic weapons may prove to be detrimental to the release of Justin Kurzel’s excellent new true-crime drama. A film not so much centered on the crime itself, but on the events leading up to one of the worst mass murders in Australia’s history.

The reliably intense Caleb Landry Jones plays the titular character (whose name is deliberately obscured), a brooding man-child who we first encounter antagonising his neighbours with firecrackers and handing out fireworks to the school kids at the local playground. His father, terrifically played by Anthony LaPaglia, is a tightly coiled bag of stress perpetually in dread of what antics his antisocial son will get up to next, while his mother (Judy Davis) has quietly resigned herself to the fact that all the tough-love parenting hasn’t exactly worked. Through a malaise of angst and early-20s boredom, Nitram drifts in the Tazmanian suburbs until, in a stranger-than-fiction twist, he meets eccentric older heiress Helen, living a Grey Gardens-esque existence in a crumbling mansion, bizarrely becoming her live-in lover despite the 30-odd year age gap.

As with their deeply disturbing crime drama Snowtown (2009), director Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant don’t scowl at their protagonists through a sanctimonious lens. Instead they let the drama unfurl slowly, perhaps hinting that male nihilism and small-town boredom create a vacuum in which terrible events are allowed to manifest. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, especially hands that can easily access automatic killing machines.

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Released 1 Jul by Picturehouse; certificate 15