Nitram

The latest from director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown) is a dark narrative portrait of the man behind Australia’s worst mass shooting.

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Nitram (Caleb Landry Jones) lives with his mother and father (Judy Davis, Anthony LaPaglia) in suburban Australia in the mid-1990s. It’s a life of isolation and frustration — until he unexpectedly finds a close friend in reclusive heiress Helen (Essie Davis). However, when that relationship ends in tragedy, Nitram’s loneliness and anger grow and he begins a slow descent toward disaster.

Directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant, who previously collaborated on past TIFF selections Snowtown (2011) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), Nitram confronts one of the darkest chapters in Australian history: the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Kurzel states, “As filmmakers we have tried to tread gently.… I have sought to reach into the darkness to find a truth and to understand the unimaginable.”

Content advisory: gun violence (off-screen), accident trauma, coarse language, mature themes