Has there been a more relentlessly repulsive fictional being than Bunny Munro? The antihero of Nick Cave’s 2009 novel The Death of Bunny Munro, as played by Matt Smith, is grotesque in the extreme: a strutting, nicotine-stained poster boy for toxic masculinity. The depths that Bunny plumbs are so abhorrent, in fact, that there were times I could scarcely watch this brilliant Sky adaptation. Directed by Isabella Eklöf and written by Pete Jackson, it’s the story of one man’s sordid descent into hell. As with Cave’s music, horror and beauty writhe together in a gothic odyssey – here, on the south coast, where a dour, grey-skied milieu adds to the atmosphere of depravity.
By trade, Bunny is a travelling beauty salesman. While he’s off with yet another woman in a hotel overlooking Brighton’s West Pier as it goes up in real and symbolic flames, his long-suffering wife Libby (Sarah Greene), tormented by his actions, finally takes her own life. At the funeral, Bunny’s reaction is to mock his father-in-law for being in a wheelchair, before having sex with his best friend’s girlfriend at the wake. As I said, not pleasant.
Amid this procession of profanities, priapic adventure and constant intoxication is Bunny’s nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior, from whom Cave’s tale wrung much of its pathos. So it proves here, too. As a studious boy who still idolises his father, Rafael Mathé is a revelation, his face a canvas onto which he effortlessly paints sadness, disappointment, hope and yearning. His performance deserves a Bafta.
When social services come knocking, all Bunny can think to do is load Junior into his car and set off on a manic road trip that is punctuated with gallows humour. Try not to laugh when one older woman, immune to his oleaginous charm, punches Bunny twice on the nose, splitting it. Or when, later in the series, the consequences of his behaviour catching up, he finds himself in the streets screaming, “Will somebody please f*** me?!”
Smith is superb. Just as his Bunny careens inexorably towards his demise, so the performance reveals more layers under the alcoholic haze, this paragon of deplorability somehow emerging as almost sympathetic. But then of course you remember that he’s just raped a woman who was barely conscious on heroin – a scene in the book for which Cave was nominated for the Bad Sex award.
Suffusing all this is a lyrical, dream-like quality, largely helped by the woozy photography. Set in 2003 (the year of the two real-life fires that destroyed Brighton’s grade I-listed pier), it’s also a modern parable of sorts. The narrative, Cave has said, is influenced by the Gospel According to St Mark in that Bunny must die so that his only begotten son may climb out of his shadow. Yes, it’s tough viewing. But for all its pervading gloom, The Death of Bunny Munro ultimately finds a flicker of light in the darkest corner of the human psyche. Much like Cave’s songs, then.
