TrailerTrack

Just in case anyone needs to hear it, we stan Anthony LaPaglia and Judy Davis.

It was a one-two punch for me with So I Married an Axe Murderer and Empire Records for LaPaglia and Davis simply for everything she’s been in, even the fantastically unknown and unappreciated The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet.

The latest from director Justin Kurzel (The Snowtown Murders, True History of the Kelly Gang) handles a story from what stands as Australia’s worst massacre in that country’s history: The Port Arthur Massacre in 1996.

Nitram (Caleb Landry-Jones) lives with his mother (Judy Davis) and father (Anthony LaPaglia) in suburban Australia in the Mid 1990s. He lives a life of isolation and frustration at never being able to fit in. That is until he unexpectedly finds a close friend in a reclusive heiress, Helen (Essie Davis). However when that friendship meets its tragic end, and Nitram’s loneliness and anger grow, he begins a slow descent into a nightmare that culminates in the most nihilistic and heinous of acts.

35 dead. 23 wounded.

The massage ushered in a new age for those who felt that freedom from gun violence trumped anyone’s right to own weapons of mass destruction.

The topic is certainly rife with high emotions, genuine feelings and a sense that this is not just a story about the eventual end of lives, it’s about something far more heinous. So, how then do you create a trailer meant to generate interest in a movie that is tangentially related to a human massacre?

This is how you do it.

This trailer, easily, is one of the best trailers I’ve seen all year. It’s slow, it’s deliberate in its pacing, it lets a moment breathe. We don’t know what exactly is happening but Davis is riveting to listen to as she recounts a moment with her son. The ending to that story is goosebump inducing and, on top of that, uses “Chopsticks” in a way we haven’t seen since Big. There is so much happening in this trailer but we’re not given anything but Judy’s story. It’s more than enough and it tells us everything we need to know.

Nitram makes its debut at the Cannes Film Festival on July 16.