Andrew Dominik’s Nick Cave Doco Hypnotises

“Illuminating tracks from the superb 2019 Bad Seeds album Ghosteen and Nick Cave’s 2021 collaboration with Warren Ellis, Carnage, this remarkable performance documentary [directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik] may be for the Nick Cave-curious exclusively, but for them (us) it is close to essential,” Variety’s Jessica Kiang writes in a review of [Dominik’s] This Much I Know to Be True.

“In a ballroom clad in crumbling plasterwork (actually a disused Bristol factory space) Dominik stages the musical sections that make up most of the film, each one a bouquet of barbed wire, sung by Cave – with his ever-witchy charisma – like it’s the last song anyone will ever hear,” Kiang writes.

“This Much I Know to Be True is calmer, more controlled and removed – there is no Cave voice-over, for one thing – and if that makes it a less extraordinary film than Dominik’s first doc about the performer, well, we might not be able to bear it if it weren’t.”

Dominik, who directed the acclaimed 2000 film, Chopper, was born in Wellington in 1967.

Original article by Jessica Kiang, Variety, February 25, 2022.