Reseñas de la crítica

Kurzel’s film is not an easy watch, if not quite as intimately excruciating as Snowtown. Both were written by regular collaborator Shaun Grant, and he ably picks at the scab of toxic masculinity. It brings no easy answers, but certainly makes no excuses.

Nitram [champions a] non-didactic approach, refusing easy answers and compounding an eerie, queasy sense that pervades everything.

We can’t escape the feeling of voyeurism, and like The Act of Killing, this is another mythologizing of a mass murderer in lieu of some appropriate wake for his innocent victims—the same queasy motivation that runs through the near-endless wave of non-fiction true-crime content.

Kurzel’s bold, daring choice—to avoid painting Bryant as either a pathetic punchbag or a monster—is the film’s greatest gamble and merit. With all its complicated efforts to both humanize and problematize its protagonist, Nitram doesn’t parcel out an apology, but something far more sinister and provocative. It blurs the distance between shooter and audience, triggering that most frightening of questions: what if it could happen to one of us, too?

There is a terrible aloofness [about "Nitram"], an inability to really get to grips with what is about to happen so far below. This is not through any failing of the film or the filmmaker, but simply because these events are, even after close and careful examination, utterly incomprehensible.

Though the portrait is neither affectionate nor flattering, it requires some degree of sympathy, even if that sympathy is very slight or takes the form of pity. There’s no doubt that “Nitram” is a powerful display of filmmaking. But the question remains: Whom is it for?

The problem with Nitram is the problem with true crime more generally since the genre exploded in popularity: the focus continues to be on the perpetrators of these horrific crimes rather than their victims. These people remain anonymous, almost an afterthought, as Kurzel and Grant are so intent on portraying the human face of the Port Arthur massacre.

Although Kurzel’s recuperation lands after a long line of films reimagining mass shootings, from Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) to two recent attempts at the 2011 murders in Oslo and beyond, it’s a painfully familiar narrative striving to highlight an odyssey of dehumanization.

An astonishing slow-burn of a true-crime drama... The idea of a Bryant biopic stirred understandable controversy in Port Arthur when it was announced, but Kurzel has gone about this task with blazing moral integrity, seeking to explain the apparently inexplicable in human terms.

Nitram certainly presents a nightmare scenario of what can happen when a tormented individual has easy access to high-powered weapons. But the film doesn’t have much to offer beyond its laments — it’s more of a mournful footnote to a tragedy than a necessary addendum.

Kurzel has made his most purely disturbing film since his debut Snowtown in 2011... And he has four outstanding performances from Judy Davis, Essie Davis, Anthony LaPaglia and Caleb Landry Jones... Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

A strong argument can be made for raising awareness and anyone who thinks Kurzel is out to sensationalize the tragic events is misreading the film, which has an undeniable gut-punch effectiveness. Still, this uncomfortable probe into the head of the killer is likely to have audiences asking once again for whom the grim, anxiety-inducing psychodrama is intended.