One More Time with Feeling

Nick Cave is finishing the recordings for the album Skeleton Tree. While the sessions were under way his fifteen-year-old son Arthur died in a fall from a cliff. The film records the completion of that album and Cave's inability to speak. The film is not interested in record-making. It is interested in continuing to work inside grief: in the studio Cave cannot finish his sentences, says words have lost their meaning, and points out that most of the songs were written before the death. The film makes no attempt to explain any of it. The form is technically unusual: shot in 3D, with both colour and black-and-white passages, and counted as the first live-action black-and-white film shot in 3D. The camera repeatedly shows its own cables, the crew and its own failures. Andrew Dominik directed. The film includes thirty-five minutes of the band performing at Air Studios in early 2016 and conversations with Cave, Warren Ellis and Cave's wife Susie Bick. It was released worldwide as a one-night cinema event the day before the album came out. Who it is for: viewers who like Nick Cave and documentaries about making things. Who it is not for: anyone sensitive about grief. The film offers no consolation and some scenes stand at the edge of privacy.