Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Netflix once again imports the unsophisticated comedy of Philomena Cunk, the British mockumentary presenter who is unimpressed with everything she sees. Her previous series, Cunk on Earth, saw her journey through our completely uneventful world. Cunk on Life, meanwhile, sees her drill down to the much more manageable topic of human existence.

There’s no pretense that this is a real documentary, even if it’s never explicitly said. The character originates from the series Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe (yes, that’s Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker), where she filled the role of dim-witted reporter à la a number of The Daily Show’s correspondents. Like the latter show, her character makes fun of the oversimplification that occurs in media intended for wide audiences, her antics a reflection of just how much they talk down to their audience.

One must be incredibly smart to do this kind of comedy. Perhaps not book smart like her very real expert interviewees but shrewd about how media gussies up wonder and awe. After all, we’re naturally enraptured by the unknowable meaning of life, right?

Nah, we’re not. Or at least we have a very limited capacity to take in such a massive question, and thus is the narrative arc for the feature. Like so many documentaries before it, one may not pick up on the throughline unless you’re paying close attention. On the surface, it’s structured episodically, with sections on Christianity, biology, art, etc, all of which roughly tie into the question of why the hell we’re here.

Along the way, Diane Morgan as the fictional Cunk takes the absolute piss out of some of our most treasured ideas and discoveries. Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead? Cunk is unphased by the notion, but she is interested in the commonality between God and Nietzche: that they’re both dead and hence must have a shared killer. Or, as she stands in front of the grisly painting The Triumph of Death, she has no greater question for an art historian than “What the f- is this?”

Quotable and clippable moments like these are the point of the Philomena Cunk oeuvre, and Cunk on Life delivers them at a remarkably steady pace. There’s the inevitable odd bits that don’t work (like a too obviously staged interview with a death row inmate), but the hits more than fill its brief runtime while ensuring Cunk doesn’t overstay her welcome.

As the film revs up for its ending, the disparate pieces come to an unsettling crescendo. A running bit about Cunk splitting into different entities, once due to mediation and later when a version of her is mysteriously stuck in a computer, coalesce into unease about the future of our personal existence and our species’ existence. Cunk on Life doesn’t have a rosy outlook for either. For the personal, it imagines all of us sitting around desperately trying to distract ourselves from the hollowness of modern life. In its bleakest, and in my book funniest, bit, it shows a fictional children’s show where puppets teach children not to throw themselves off a building, our inability to really contend with the questions the series mercilessly mocks having infested even our kids.To our species’ existence, it posits the well-worn fear that the sturdiness of technology will replace our fragile lives.

The structure seems to imply that these questions will catch up to us no matter how deeply we bury our heads in the sand, or in a silly mockumentary. Cunk herself certainly never lets this structure bother her. Morgan never breaks her character’s inherent flippancy, only ever getting agitated over facile distractions. The experts she shares the screen with almost certainly know the joke going in, but they’re such invested nerds that they can’t help getting genuinely excited from time to time. Cunk always brings them down to Earth, though. After questioning particle physicist Brian Cox about multiverses, she asserts that only one alternate universe exists, the one in mirrors. Cox is dumbfounded. After a beat, Cunk asks if she’s wasting Cox’s time. “Yeah,” he blurts out. Except she hasn’t. She’s given him a platform to wax poetic about the Large Hadron Collider, which is revealing some of the most basic building blocks of the universe. Then, before our brains overload from the enormous ramifications of these discoveries, she calms us down with a joke. Then it’s on to the next ginormous idea, and then it’s on with our lives, our only exhaustion coming from laughing a bit too hard.

Release: Available now on Netflix
Director: Al Campbell
Writers: Charlie Brooker, Ben Caudell, Erika Ehler, Charlie George, Eli Goldstone, Jason Hazeley, Lucia Keskin, Joel Morris, Michael Odewale
Cast: Diane Morgan