Caleb Landry Jones Brought Us Into the Mind of a Killer in This Drama

From the beginning of his career, Caleb Landry Jones has been a dependable source of colorful characters who light up a scene. Since first appearing as one of the kids in the final scene of No Country For Old Men, he has moved on to be an important player in films ranging from X-Men: First Class to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Get Out. He specialized in playing either guys who just gave you the willies for a reason you can’t explain or ones who come off as a goofy manchild which makes him endearing. While he hasn’t often had the chance to be the lead in a major film, whenever he does get to star, he absolutely nails it. See Brandon Cronenberg‘s Antiviral or Luc Besson‘s latest film, Dogman, to see Jones effortlessly step into the spotlight. One of his very best leading performances came in 2021 with the Australian drama, Nitram, which tasked him with portraying one of the most notorious mass shooters in world history. He gave a performance that was a gold standard in how to portray real-life murderers with empathy and an appropriate level of uncomfortable identification.

Nitram (2021)

A portrait of a disturbed man’s life in suburban Australia, detailing his tumultuous relationships with his parents and an eccentric heiress who further feeds his disconnection from society. The narrative meticulously explores his descent into despair and aggression, setting the stage for a devastating outcome that prompts a national examination of laws and societal norms.

What Is ‘Nitram’ About?

Nitram (Jones) is a young man living in Tasmania, Australia, who has a severe case of bad vibes. He’s a surly, rambunctious bloke who loves playing with firecrackers, trying to start his amateur lawnmowing business, and goading other people on with his behavior. His mother (Judy Davis) and father (Anthony LaPaglia) do their best to love and appreciate their son as he is, clearly having long submitted to the fact that their son will always be maladjusted. They have a pseudo-good-cop-bad-cop dynamic, where his mother is more stern and attempts to lay down the law as Dad lets things slide and tries to be more chummy. The moments of actual happiness are like quick flashes of a lighthouse before darkness takes over again, as Nitram is ultimately too adrift in his own world to be saved. The only real solace he finds is with a local heiress named Helen (Essie Davis), who takes to him like one of the numerous dogs she keeps after he comes offering his lawnmowing skills. She appreciates his company and finds him supportive and the only person who wants to be around her, forming a kinship not unlike Harold and Maude, minus any hint of sexual or romantic longing. A connection like this gives Nitram aspirations, allowing him a taste of the flourishing social life he’s always wanted.

Caleb Landry Jones Plays a Version of Real-Life Mass Murderer Martin Bryant

There’s something truly repellent about Nitram. His parents can only put up with him for so long, and even they can’t hide how stunned they are by his antics. Any attempt at talking to people besides his parents or Helen leads to negative results, be it entertaining younger kids with firecrackers, or trying to talk to somebody his age that he used to go to school with, only to be dissuaded by that guy insulting him. Helen seems to talk to him mainly because he makes her feel good about herself; and frankly, nobody else seems willing to talk to her. She comes off as the local crazy lady, given her badly dyed hair job and deteriorating mansion that she doesn’t take care of. But Nitram finds a way to ruin even that one good relationship he has, exhibiting how helpless he is in the face of his own worst impulses. Throughout the film, he has this stricken grimace plastered on his face anytime something goes wrong, silently beating himself up and trying to rebuild the walls that are clearly tumbling down. Worse yet is how painfully self-aware he is about his shortcomings, sharing with his mum that he knows that people openly claim that he’s mentally challenged and a burden on his family.

Jones shows us things about Nitram that he couldn’t verbalize by honing in on the mental limitations of the character, and how they manifest physically. The character of Nitram is based on the real-life Martin Bryant (yes, Nitram backward is Martin) who, back in 1996, committed the deadliest mass murder in modern Australian history known as the Port Arthur massacre. Bryant was confirmed to have the mental capacity of an 11-year-old, with an IQ of 66, and Jones displays his clunky childishness so effectively that it limits the need for exposition. He lumbers around with shoulders first and head hung low, shrinking himself down in stature, despite his height. He clearly has no clue how to process any extremely negative emotions, resorting to physical violence or incoherent screeching when he’s visibly upset, and holding people captive when the volcano erupts.

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Sometimes his violent outbursts have even less rationale, like when he will sit on the passenger side of a car and grab the wheel to swerve it into oncoming traffic, all for the joy of it. Jones interprets Nitram as an underdeveloped child who doesn’t understand his own strength and is desperate to feel accepted in a way that he finds more accommodating (to him only). His mother is too strict and blunt, his Dad is too ineffectual and mopey, and Helen feeds into all of his antics with the enthusiasm of the cool aunt who lets you get away with way too much when your parents aren’t looking. He clings onto her as the mother figure he always wanted, and part of the tragedy is seeing how the behavior pattern that made Helen interested in Nitram is also what takes her away from him.

Nitram’s Relationship With His Mother Is Key to the Film’s Success

Speaking of mother figures, the key to unlocking how the film works so devastatingly is in the relationship between Nitram and his mum, and the interplay that Jones has with Judy Davis. Unconditional motherly love is a concept usually taken at face value as a beautiful notion, but Davis’s uncompromising performance suggests that it can also be an immense curse. She may have accepted who Nitram is and may be able to discipline him and keep him somewhat in line, but she’s long given up on any semblance of hope or goodwill for him. It’s not that she doesn’t love him, it’s that she’s smart enough to not have any hope for him. Davis shines playing a woman with a spine of steel and clear vision, best exemplified in a scene where she describes how Nitram has always been the way he is. She tells how he intentionally hid away from her for so long that she thought he was kidnapped, only to reveal himself and laugh at her misery, leading her to become convinced that he will always cause you pain and then laugh about it.

This culminates in a brutal conversation between them, where Nitram breaks down, frustrated with the direction his life has taken and at a loss about how to change things. He points out how he doesn’t understand why his father can be so constantly down in the dumps, pointing out his belief that everybody walks around feeling bad all the time and functions just fine. It’s the closest we get to a spoken insight into how Nitram’s mind works, his assumption that the human condition is inherently built on suffering. She is as supportive as she can be, essentially following the script of a loving mother, but Davis hints at a feeling of scrounging for the bare minimum, while Jones is imploding from the humiliation of admitting to his limitations. It’s a sad snapshot of their entire relationship in one moment, also functioning as a harbinger of the eventually increasing instability that Nitram will experience.

‘Nitram’ Depicts a Killer Without Trying to Sympathize With Him

Trying to make a film that explores (and sometimes explains) an atrocity like mass murder is a dubious idea, to be sure. Some films attempt to go for a coldly factual approach, presenting it as an unavoidable force of nature (We Need to Talk About Kevin). Others go in the direction of trying to get into the head of the perpetrator, to the point of rationalizing their viewpoint so much that it inadvertently becomes apologia (Joker). Nitram rides a precarious line of imagining the world as Nitram/Martin felt it, but never truly getting inside his mind, not even attempting to diagnose or point fingers at what could have caused him to do this.

Even by the time he’s acquiring guns and teaching himself to fire them, it feels like a queasy twist the movie never hinted towards, leaving us to look at Jones’ face as a last-ditch effort for answers. It’s through Jones’ performance that we experience the underlying emotional destruction that pushed this man in an unthinkable direction: the hopelessness, confusion and, distorted anger. While other films are callous enough to try and be the final word on why such things happen in the world, Caleb Landry Jones’ performance ensures that Nitram is a film that knows that it can never truly explain anything like that. It instead portrays a tragic series of dominoes that start falling due to both the casual cruelties of the world he lived in and Nitram’s own catastrophic behavioral impulses that led him to throw what essentially amounted to the worst possible temper tantrum by a terribly isolated child.

Nitram can be watched on AMC+

WATCH ON AMC+