Nitram is a film impressively brave in its subject matter, the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, Australia, which resulted in the deaths of 35 people. The film is brave in the sense that the massacre itself and the concept of mass shootings in general are such volatile substances to hold. It requires the deftest touch to render such events without glorifying the perpetrator or losing sight of the suffering of victims. As a film, Nitram has that deft touch.

It's actually very untrue to say that the film is about the massacre, because what it’s really about is how someone—anyone—could ever commit it. The entire film centres on the psyche of perpetrator, but it’s intelligent and subtle enough not to presume to understand that psyche.

The film’s title posters this fact. The perpetrator of the Port Arthur shooting was Martin Bryant. ‘Nitram’ is just ‘Martin’ spelled backwards, and it’s a term that his peers used to ridicule him, in large part because he was intellectually impaired. You could say there were further reasons for the film’s title, other than the circumvention of giving status to the perpetrator’s name. Word-lust might lead to ideas about some warped alter-ego hiding in what seems like normal Martin; or it’s just Martin flipped out. But what’s sure about the title is that it tells us we’re not watching the film to see the shooting; we’re there to see the person. But a last word on the title: it establishes an all-important frame of reference: watching the movie we’re not now, finally, being shown the true Martin; we’re still on the outside; and we’re still bullying him.

The film is a study of Nitram’s years of adulthood up until the shooting, which occurred when he was 28. There is something of a pastiche of years of being bullied by his peers and living with his parents in a volatile household frayed by misunderstanding and miscommunication. Nitram is something of an adult in the form of a child. He gets in trouble letting off fireworks; he mows lawns for money; he gets in a quarrels with his parents; he’s like a maladjusted teenager that can’t do right, can’t understand why people treat him the way they do, and acts out because he doesn’t know where to fit in.

The plot gets its impetus from Nitram’s encounter with a woman named Mary Elizabeth Harvey. Harvey first pays Nitram to walk her dogs but the pair soon grow close and Nitram soon moves into her dilapidated mansion. In Harvey’s character, there’s something of the mischievousness of Maude in Hal Ashby’s bleakly comical Harold and Maude, something of the volatile oddity of mother and daughter Beale in the Maysles brother’s eerily quirky documentary Grey Gardens. Nitram lives off Harvey’s inherited wealth, and the pair of them get up to a zany kind of no-good. Nitram becomes further estranged from his parents and he seems to try to invent and give expression to a persona he doesn’t understand, dressing in gauche opulence and spending lavishly.

Harvey dies in a road collision while Nitram is in the car. There’s always been suspicion he caused the crash. Within a year, Nitram’s father commits suicide. If there had been hope of social adjustment and stability for Nitram, it was now gone.

There’s a telling interplay of dialogue between Nitram and his mother soon after his father’s death. Sitting at the dinner table and thumbing his video recorder he tells his mother, ‘Sometimes I watch myself but I don’t know who it is that I’m looking at. Like, I can’t get to him. If I could just change him so that he was like everyone else… but I don’t know how. So instead I’m here, stuck here, like this, eating this shit, talking to you, all because I’m not a coward like him’. In a scene of awful pathos, his mother tells him she doesn’t understand what he's said. Nitram responds, ‘Doesn’t matter mum, neither do I’.

The interplay emblemises a beautiful script. Never over-written, it speaks a simple language, Nitram’s language; and it never says more than what we know of Nitram. It also shows that Nitram probably doesn’t know more about Nitram than we do, either.

The film’s direction and cinematography reflect this authentic approach to understanding, as best we can, a mind that came to imagine the unimaginable, then act on it. The camera paints with a soft palette, befitting an unextraordinary Tasmanian suburbia. Later in the film, the depiction is intensified. The scene in which Nitram tells his mother that he doesn’t understand himself, for example, is inflamed in violent hues of red.

As for direction, Kurzel had already displayed his exquisite skill in playing a slow hand in his earlier true-crime film Snowtown. In Nitram, he lets what is sedate and simple about the protagonist’s surroundings stay that way. He gives focus to intense emotion when due. The plot is given its pace by an assured and sensitive hand. It never gets ahead of itself to build unnecessary excitement and it never lingers so long as to manufacture mystery. The protagonist, like life itself, is enigmatic enough, and Kurzel is intelligent enough and skilful enough that he doesn’t try to say what cannot be said.

The film is a beautiful creature in many ways, but its beating heart is Caleb Landry Jones’ sublime rendering of the protagonist. Were he alive and youthful enough when the film was made, it’s hard to see how doors wouldn’t have been trampled to get Australian actor Heath Ledger to play the role. It’s certainly a rarity that foreign actors can land the tone and cadence of Australian speech—there is time for due pause to give Quentin Tarantino the award for the worst (and perhaps intentionally so?) attempt in the history of cinema, during his cameo at the end of Django Unchained—but the fact that Jones executes it perfectly is a footnote to his performance as a whole. Footage of the police interviewing Martin Bryant after the shooting is accessible, and it’s clear that Jones has studied him well. He’s particularly sensitive to the subtle volatility of a psyche coloured in shades of childish naivety, insolence, malevolence, subterfuge, and a genuinely painful lack of understanding about who Nitram is and why people won’t treat him the way they do everyone else.

The film is beautiful in its vision and exquisite in its execution. This article didn’t mention anything about the direct impact the Port Arthur massacre had in precipitating massive changes in Australian gun control—the results of which are so often brought up elsewhere decades later. But there was no call to, because the film aims higher. In its art, it gives us a depth of insight into the frailty and caprice of the human condition that one needs before thinking about anything at all.