Nitram

Miss Lumière is back in the cinema ... The alienated life of Martin Bryant ... A strange inheritance ...Guns and cash ... The story leading up to the Port Arthur massacre 

Port Arthur: the end point of a flawed start in life

Just as Port Arthur was a tragedy waiting to happen, Nitram was a film waiting to be made. 

The infamous massacre, forever linked with the name Martin Bryant, seems inexorable when viewed through the unflinching lens of one of Australia's boldest filmmakers, Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, Macbeth, True History of the Kelly Gang).

Kurzel and his scriptwriter Shaun Grant have fashioned a quietly menacing horror story without showing a single victim on screen, and significantly, without proffering an easy explanation.

In framing the events of 1996 squarely around Bryant's bizarre life, up until the moment when he gunned down 35 people at Port Arthur, Kurzel has managed to present a tragedy of classical import.

That the tragedy belongs to so many, simply adds to its power.

Bryant is flawed from the start. The film's opening sequence, a piece of archival TV footage in which a sly, blond young Martin Bryant is interviewed in the burns unit of a local hospital, presages the horrors to come.

These horrors are the substance of what amounts to a chilling portrait of alienation. 

They include Bryant's fascination with fireworks, his clinical depression, his weirdness, his bullying and rejection, the death of his only friend, the suicide of his father and the cold controlling hand of his mother - another nerve-tingling performance by Judy Davis, all cigarettes and wrinkles. 

Bryant: seen six years ago at Risdon Prison

As Bryant, whose schoolmates taunted him by calling him Nitram (Martin backwards) American actor Caleb Landry Jones is breathtakingly good.

Nervy, disquieting, naïve. One is never sure if he is knowingly malign. 

Bryant (who is never named in the film) wears his disturbances slightly, beneath a veil of greasy fair hair and daggy, unwashed clothes, although it's clear they can erupt at any time.

One of the most shocking scenes occurs when he violently attacks his beloved father (a poignant performance by Anthony LaPaglia) who has collapsed into a kind of alcoholic depression on a sofa covered in plastic - perhaps reason enough.

The story of what led Bryant to that moment at Port Arthur is stranger than fiction and involves his unlikely relationship with the much older Tattslotto heiress, Helen Harvey, who lives in a decrepit mansion with some 20 dogs and cats and Gilbert & Sullivan on repeat play.

She makes Big Edie from Grey Gardens look like Jackie Kennedy.

Helen (played with mad relish by Essie Davis) invites him to live with her and lavishes money on Bryant, telling his bewildered parents:

"He's considerate, helpful and funny. A special man, and a dear friend." 

After Helen dies in a car crash caused by Bryant, he inherits her not inconsiderable estate and a lot of cash. Things quickly start to go awry, beginning with the amassing of guns.

A scene in a Tasmanian gun shop where Bryant buys a boot-load of firearms using a duffle bag stuffed with notes is memorable in a grimly absurd way, for the proprietor's slick, rapid-fire sales spiel.  

Nitram walks away with a veritable armoury after declaring he's never had a gun licence. 

And therein lies another whole tragedy.

* Nitram is screening now at selected cinemas and on Stan from November 24.