NITRAM***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 7

NITRAM is a stunning and disturbing film from Aussie writer-director Justin Kurzel that covers a deeply traumatic and controversial mass shooting in mid-1990s Tasmania. The perpetrator was a man called Martin, who was teased with the nickname Nitram because he was mentally "backward".  Indeed, it's a open question what's wrong with Martin. He seems childlike - his mother describes behaviour that seems psychopathic - he's being prescribed drugs for depression - he has an unhealthy obsession with fireworks and guns. What's clear is that his parents love him but also enable him - particularly his dad - and at various points of the film I became angry that he wasn't in a residential care facility rather than out and about in the general community. 

The truth is stranger than fiction.  This misfit somehow meets an incredibly wealthy eccentric older woman (Essie Davis) and she essentially bankrolls him and takes him in, even though even she draws the line at buying him a gun.  As the film develops we see that this newfound freedom and money does not satisfy Martin. He remains severely lonely, unhappy and disturbed. And so we move to the inevitable final act, which is handled delicately and largely off-screen. We are left with harsh questions.  Could his parents have prevented this? His doctors?  The people he freaked out but who didn't report anything? And would anything have happened if he hadn't had the (mis)fortune of access to wealth, and thanks to Australia's then lax gun laws, a cache of arms?

Caleb Landry Jones won the acting award at Cannes for his performance in NITRAM and it's well deserved. It's incredibly moving and nuanced - at once terrifying and heart-breaking. I was physically wincing in fear, but also believed Martin genuinely loved his mum and particularly his dad. Judy Davis is typically brilliant as Martin's mum and Anthony LaPaglia is heartbreaking as his dad. 

I also loved the choice to use a limited claustrophobic aspect ratio that makes us feel trapped by Martin in the hazy summer heat of dusty abandoned rooms. This is arguably Kurzel's most assured and impressive film to date. Kudos to all involved. 

NITRAM played Cannes 2021 where Caleb Landry Jones won Best Actor. It was released earlier this year in Australia. The film has a running time of 112 minutes.

HINTERLAND*** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 7

HINTERLAND is a breathtakingly fast paced murder mystery set in a nightmarish almost graphic novel/Caligari-esque post WW1 Vienna.  Actors move in front of painted backgrounds where familiar Vienna landmarks lean at queasy angles and buildings seem to fall into each other like drunken lechers. This is less contemporary Disney Habspurg Vienna than the Third Man meets Alan Moore.

As the film opens our Austrian soldiers are returning to a Vienna they don't recognise from a Russian prison camp.  Someone even has to explain what this random red white and red flag is - they are unaware that they have a new flag and indeed a new Republic. The atmosphere is febrile and antagonistic. The soldiers resent the men who didn't fight. Those who stayed at home resent the soldiers for not recognising that they too have suffered deprivations.  Food is scarce. Rats run rampant.  And a scared populace is drifting toward extremes - whether communism or fascism.

Stuck in the middle is our traumatised hero Peter Perg (Murathan Muslu). He resumes his work as a detective - thank goodness because otherwise he'd be in a poorhouse full of demobbed unemployed soldiers. Perg and his sidekicks Severin and Dr Koerner (Liv Lisa Fries - BABYLON BERLIN) are on the trace of a viciously brutal serial killer who is going after former prisoners of war.  The investigation produces utterly vicious tableaux and also explores just how brutal the war really was, especially in the Russian camps (although Perg is careful to say every side was as bad as the other).

The film is, then, nasty and eye-opening.  Growing up in Britain we learned a lot about the British war experience and even the German experience but this is probably the first time I've really sat with what happened to Austria after the war. It feels like a Nietschean world where, with the Empire dead, everything is permitted. There is no decency and few correct choices. And even in the film's mordant humour, our hero keeps being arrested by the police when he himself is the victim of a crime. 

Is the film a success? I'm not sure. The design is great and the insights powerful. But the serial killer mystery seems to resolve rather easily and quickly and I felt that the inability of actors to interact with the surroundings gave the film an artifice that was ultimately distracting and undermining.

HINTERLAND has a running time of 112 minutes. It is currently playing the BFI London Film Festival and was released in Germany last week. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the USA or UK.

MASS**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 6

Actor Fran Kranz' directorial debut MASS feels like a dramatised play - an intense four-hander where two couples meet in a church to explain why one couple's child committed a mass shooting that killed the other couples' child.  The former, Richard and Linda, are played  by Reed Birney and Ann Dowd (THE HANDMAID'S TALE) - the latter, Jay and Gail, by Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton.

The shooter's parents explain how their child was lonely and bullied in a new school and retreated into an online world.  He became depressed and the parents struggled to ensure the right medical treatment. He was interested in bombs and tried to make a bomb.  But they didn't tell the school because his grades were good and they didn't want to jeopardise his schooling. With the benefit of hindsight they realise their son was lying.

At the other end of the table, Jay is quiet. He stresses they didn't and don't want to sue.  He has been active in campaigning for gun control but doesn't see that as political.  It's the most quiet and moving performance I have ever seen from Jason Isaacs, who is often cast as a blustering super-confident charismatic alpha male. I hope it earns his award nominations.  Meanwhile, his wife Gail starts off as merely enquiring but becomes more and more frustrated, clearly seeking an answer and a reason for her child's death, and almost forcing the other parents to admit - what - guilt? Culpability? Incompetence as parents?

The resulting film is a rightly tough watch as we are trapped at the table with four people in grief and anger and hear of a fifth who was clearly also deeply disturbed.  There are no easy answers or resolutions.  And I chose to take the closing choral music as ironic. I do not feel any of these parents feels safe or at peace. 

MASS has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film played Sundance and the BFI London Film Festival 2021. 

ALL IS VANITY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 6

Marcos Mereles' debut feature is a really impressive, twisty, sardonic almost uncategorisable film. It launches him as a genuine new talent and someone I'll keep an eye out for in future.

The film opens in an austere warehouse location and plays like a satire on the superficial nasty world of fashion shoots. The cast is small - a photographer, his unpaid intern, a model and a make-up artist - bitching and blaming each other for the shoot's failure.  And then, around half way through, one of the characters disappears and the film takes a turn into genre-bending meta-narrative that is super-smart, very confident and utterly brilliant. This is low-budget film-making at its finest, where the limitations of cast, location and budget are turned into virtues with intelligence plugging all the gaps. 

ALL IS VANITY has a running time of 72 minutes. It debuted at the BFI London Film Festival and does not yet have a commercial release date. 

BOILING POINT* - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 6

Writer-director Philip Barantini (VILLAIN) debuts at the Festival with his single-take drama BOILING POINT. The film stars Stephen Graham as a shouty angry chef who is also an alcoholic and cocaine addict. We follow him and his team over the course of a fateful night as his restaurant comes under criticism from inspectors; comes under financial pressure from Jason Flemyng's Alex; has to deal with obnoxious diners; and where his sous-chef basically has to carry the strain of dealing with his drug-driven incompetence. The result is a claustrophobic but ultimately quite obvious film where Chekhov's peanut allergy comes into play, and the end-point is also highly predictable. The shouty angry druggy chef is sadly now a trope in real life and on screen and we never get beyond that to discover why we should sympathise or empathise with him. The film is marketed as a character study but I just never felt it delivered on that score. I had no clear idea of the chef's motivations or what was driving him. And that is fatal in a move like this.

BOILING POINT is rated R and has a running time of 92 minutes.

THE POWER OF THE DOG***** - BFI London Film Festival - Day 6

Jane Campion returns to the Festival with her breathtaking and slippery adaptation of Thomas Savage's novel.  The film is set in Montana in the 1920s and cinematographer  Ari Wegner (TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG) creates landscapes so stunning that I really hope she wins awards for this work. I also implore you to try and see this film on the largest screen you can find when Netflix puts it out on limited release rather than waiting to watch it at home.

The movie stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a cattle rancher called Phil Burbank.  When we meet him he's a nasty homophobic misogynistic bully who strides around unwashed and intimidating all and sundry. But as the movie enters its second hour we learn that Phil has many layers and our understanding of him deepens and softens. 

The target of Phil's bullying behaviour are his soft-hearted and plain-talking brother George's new wife Rose (played by real life couple Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst). When we meet Rose she is a timid lonely widow, running a small rooming house alongside her teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Both Rose and Peter are mocked by Phil, but his brother George genuinely falls for her and takes her to live in a dark brooding grand house.  Rose is intimidated by Phil most of all, but also by George's fancy friends and parents. Dunst breaks our heart with her portrait of a woman brought to ruin by intimidation.

It's absolutely key that we believe in her ruin because that becomes the motivating point of the plot - both her reactions to and the motives of Phil and her son Peter and the relationship they form when he come home from school. What I love about the film is that even as we reach the final fifteen minutes it could go one of many ways depending on our interpretation of each character's feelings and character. I can honestly say that I was genuinely surprised by the outcome, but that when I saw it, I felt it was authentic and had been properly established in prior scenes. In other words, Jane Campion is playing fair with us.

Overall, THE POWER OF THE DOG is just a stunning film - beautifully written, scored, acted, filmed - the pacing perfection and the unfolding mystery gripping. 

THE POWER OF THE DOG is rated R and has a running time of 125 minutes. The film played Venice, Toronto and London 2021. It will be released on Netflix on December 1st.