Never has the thrum of distant lawnmowers taken on such inherent menace as their wasp-like buzzing in director Justin Kurzel’s latest Australian nightmare, Nitram. Tracing the disastrous spiral towards the infamous Port Arthur shooting massacre, it begins, much like his debut Snowtown, with the humdrum normality of suburbia tilted at a disorientating angle.
Australian acting royalty Judy Davis (The Dressmaker) and Anthony LaPaglia (Lantana) portray the on-edge parents of the man who will soon commit a crime so previously unimaginable that it famously changed the country’s gun laws in 12 days flat. The film does not glorify his murderous act or even depict it. Nor does it name him. What it does, with bone-shuddering brilliance, is reinforce why those reforms were necessary.
Texan Caleb Landry Jones, then, is an intelligent casting choice. He grasps the shape of the shadow cast by such monsters. He brings a sketchy kind of chaos, hovering at school gates, obsessing about surfers and dangerously grabbing the wheel while his father is driving. We aren’t asked to sympathise with this figure, only to fear his grim potential. Particularly because so few figures around him seem able or willing to recognise his barely restrained mania. His parents are worn thin from it, and they turn away.
It’s in this disturbed space that the lawnmower’s growl brings him to the door of eccentric recluse Helen, played with a similarly unnerving, but less threatening, zeal by The Babadook star Essie Davis. He offers to cut her lawn, they forge unlikely and ultimately tragic alliance in her crumbling abode, roamed by free-ranging hounds and haunted by the discordant warping of Gilbert and Sullivan records. Taking him under her already broken wing, his obsessive nature seems only to worsen.
Kurzel’s film is not an easy watch, if not quite as intimately excruciating as Snowtown. Both were written by regular collaborator Shaun Grant. It brings no easy answers, but certainly makes no excuses. Jones’s towering performance deserved to win him the Best Actor prize, and may.
Nitram will stream on Stan from Nov 24.
