Nordic Film Talks: Isabella Eklöf

Isabella Eklöf is a Swede who spent decades living in Denmark and has now found inspiration in the decaying seaside towns of England for her new project, the six-part TV series The Death of Bunny Munro.

She was fascinated to show the “crumbling empire” of the UK: “It reached its heyday in the 1880s, and has been going downhill ever since. There's something extraordinarily romantic and beautiful about that. The seaside landscapes around Brighton are absolutely gorgeous…and dirty and rundown and horrible,” she says in the latest episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast.

She had been wanting to adapt Nick Cave’s novel since she first read it in 2014 – and now she calls the series “probably the best work I’ll ever do”. Matt Smith plays the title character, a womanising salesman who takes his son on a road trip after his wife dies by suicide.

Eklöf says of the book: “Being a modernist, what I like is the internal frenzied monologue which this novel has. You can see the influences of Nabokov, for example, with manic ranting, very playful language, it’s very fun and very disrespectful and very brutal.”

Eklöf – who previously directed the features Holiday and Kalak and co-wrote Ali Abbasi’s Border (Gräns) – has previously directed episodes of Apple’s Servant and HBO/BBC’s Industry, but Bunny Munro (written by Pete Jackson) was the first time she really felt like a showrunner. “This was like making a film, a very long film, an epic film.”

London-based Clerkenwell Films, which is behind the Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, produces. The series premieres on Sky in the UK on Nov 20, and will begin its international journey later.

As she prepares for Bunny Munro’s launch, she’s also busy at work – with the clock ticking – on the first of Zentropa’s new Dogma 25 films, titled Mr. Nawashi. She announced the film on Oct 6, 2025, so by the new Dogma rules she has exactly one year to finish the entire film. She says the rush is “a nightmare, it also takes away the anxiety of perfectionism. It also takes away the impetus of finance people to force you to do endless. It’s take it or leave it. Both within and without you, it takes away that element of anxiety and nervousness. There's nothing so uncreative as fear.” Currently, the script (which is unfinished) is set in Denmark, Sweden, and the Caribbean.

She has said Mr. Nawashi is a “BDSM love story”, and reveals during the podcast that it is partially inspired by her own story with a dominant ex-boyfriend. She says with a laugh: “A good dom deserves some external recognition. They don't get to stand on a podium and receive awards for being the best dom in Denmark this year. So I think he deserves attention because he was amazing and it was very, very hot and very interesting.”

She has sometimes directed scenes – as in Holiday or Kalak – that have been labelled controversial or transgressive. “But if the details happen to be from real life, maybe there's a richness to it that can teach us something important, or at least shine a light on something that we maybe didn't realise or didn't see. I don't think you're supposed to have all the answers when you start making a film.”

In the full podcast episode, Eklöf explains why she recently moved back home to Stockholm; why she fought to ensure the character of Bunny Munro actually dies; and why she wants to make a Tarkovsky-esque film.

Listen to the podcast here:

All Nordic Film Talks episodes are available on NFTVF’s website on the Industry Insights section (CLICK HERE), and are distributed through major podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon, Castbox, Deezer, Podcast Addict, Podchaser and JioSaavn.