Streaming on Foxtel until December 2026 - Rod Bishop reports on NICK CAVE’S VEILED WORLD (Mike Christie, UK, 2025)

Nick Cave performs in Zagreb

The Australian/American bass player from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers opens this extraordinary documentary: 

“The amazing thing about the world Nick created through the movies, books and the songs is that they are full of the most divine, beautiful characters. And then, there’s the most pathetic of victims, the most ruthless of evildoers and just the worst of humanity. (Flea)

Other excerpts from the documentary’s first 10 minutes:

“Nick, I think, was very interested in the outlaw, the kind of Old Testament type world. So called norms of society and what is considered acceptable. What is just. The outlaw challenges all those things.

Ned Kelly was an outlaw figure that loomed very large in our imaginations. Nick actually grew up in Kelly country. There’s a direct lineage to some of the very dramatic things that were happening in Melbourne when Nick was growing up…But we’re also in a very extreme part of the world. It’s like another planet and we are the uninvited.” (John Hillcoat, The Proposition)

“For me, it’s always been fundamentally important that I’m seen as an Australian performer. I mean, it’s always been my thing. It’s my schtick and that the Bad Seeds are an Australian band.” (Nick Cave)

“I think Nick could only have come from Australia. Now, when Australian art is at its very best, someone like Barry Humphries, there’s a poetic nature to it. There’s a playfulness. There’s a sort of sacredness, and there’s a profanity to it.” (Warren Ellis, Bad Seed)

“It wasn’t many moons ago, that they thought we were a bunch of rough diamonds down there. But you know we’ve got more culture than a penicillin factory in Australia.” (Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson)

“The Australian morality is like the criminal morality…Like the rules that you’re taught at school are very much jailhouse rules. In Australia, you had to be good, or the audience would rip you apart.

The Birthday Party and the early Bad Seeds are confrontational music. The idea was to provoke. You got the feeling that when you went to see them, that anything could happen, violence could erupt. It was like they were ready to die onstage.

Nick was always a figure of myth. Just like Jesus or something. Do you know what I mean? Or like the Evil Jesus of Melbourne.

I met Nick at the drug dealers. I was just like an innocent private school boy working on my first heroin habit and I walked in, and there was the Prince of Darkness sitting on the couch watching a documentary about earth worms. I asked him ‘What are you watching?’ and he just turned around and bared his teeth at me.” (Andrew Dominik, Chopper, This Much I Know To Be True, One More Time With Feeling).

Although the documentary is only 65 minutes long, the density, contemplation and profundity of those interviewed holds true throughout, making it easily the most insightful documentary yet made about Cave. 

Nick Cave and Rowan Williams at the Coronation of Charles III

Others interviewed include the surprising Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, referred to by The Guardian as “the rock star” of Nick Cave’s Veiled World.There’s Wings of Desire director Wim Wenders; Florence Welsh (Florence and the Machine), Colin Greenwood (Radiohead), Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting); Thomas Wydler (Bad Seed), Seán O’Hagen (co-writer with Cave of Faith, Hope and Carnage); Bella Freud (fashion designer and maker of Cave’s suits), Polly Borland (photographer); Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (20,000 Days on Earth); Nick Launay, Pete Jackson and Isabelle Eklöf (The Death of Bunny Munro); Thomas Houseago (sculptor); and Mick Harvey (former Bad Seed).

All focus on Cave’s enormous creativity through his long career of songs, soundtracks and books - the saints and sinners, the addicts and angels, and his fusion of biblical imagery with punk music. Only his remarkable internet dialogues with his fans in The Red Right Hand Files is missing.

At the end of the film, now no longer the drug addicted Prince of Darkness with ‘the scent of sulphur’ coming off him, who once challenged and provoked his audiences, Cave is a man whose grief has led him further into religion and spirituality, with a new and deep respect for the humanity of his audiences. 

In a final concert clip, he’s like a gospel preacher, rousing an audience into an uplifting celebration of “Joy” from his last album Wild God. Rowan Williams appears once more for his last contribution, a piercingly learned insight into the differences between joy and happiness.

Bob Dylan was there:

“Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings 'We've all had too much sorrow, now it’s the time for joy. ' I was thinking to myself, yeah that's about right.”⁠