Peacock (2024) opens with a scene both oddly quaint and chaotic, and as such gives us an early, handy symbol for what is to follow: there’s a lot of quaint chaos here. In a rolling, sunlit golf course, we see a burning golf buggy. This attracts the attention of a young couple who come to the rescue, putting out the fire before enthusiastically embracing. They seem to be enjoying the positive attention they gain after just the right amount of manageable peril. Okay – this seems strange. But we move from playing golf to listening to classical music, and there’s the same, altruistic boyfriend again. This is Matthias (Albrecht Schuch), now cast in the role of cultured partner, saying all of the right things about the very exclusive performance at hand for a wholly different woman. He seems like the sort of person you could take anywhere, and it seems lots of people like to do just that.
Matthias works for a very exclusive agency called My Companion. It’s emphatically non-sexual; he provides his services to anyone who books them, be they man, woman or child. The purpose of the service, if we can sum it up, seems to be to bolster the social standing of the client. Pretend artsy boyfriend, cool dad, dutiful son – you name it. Matthias is great at his job, but around the edges of his job, he’s trying to fit in an authentic life of his own. He has a partner called Sophia (Julia Franz Richter) and they have been together long enough to pose for an arty black and white portrait together, which hangs proudly on the bedroom wall. Their apartment is gorgeous and their lives appear easy, inexplicably moneyed and contented (not dissimilar, actually, to the people in another WatchAUT 2025 title, Veni Vidi Vici). And yet, there’s some sort of strain there, manifesting largely through random purchases. When the going gets tough, buy a Great Dane, apparently. Sophia, for her part, complains that Matthias doesn’t feel real anymore. She may have a point.
As his own life grows increasingly fraught, Matthias is left to figure out who he is and where he’s going – all whilst continuing to excel at his profession. A profession which almost necessitates a continued blurring at the edges…of course, something’s gotta give.
This story could have played out in a nightmarish fashion, and lots of drama, horror and even sci-fi has taken this approach to the whole loss-of-self motif. Here, inasmuch as there are definitely some poignant moments, Peacock is much gentler than that. It has a wide-ranging approach to humour without deliberately foregrounding that comedy, never yelling at the audience to notice it and to respond accordingly. There’s dry wit throughout, observational humour in places and silly physical humour in others – not to mention a few pitch-black moments. Schuch is a great choice for this role: young, handsome and plausible, but also somehow blank, ready to be overwritten. It’s only very gradually that you start to see more in there, beyond the good looks. His own emotions can be gleaned then, but with some effort: for the most part, Matthias is quite tough to read, but worth the effort, and he grows as a character throughout. The film is edited in such a way as to provide snapshots of Matthias’s life, leaving us to work out what has been happening in the interim. He’s a bewildered, strangely sympathetic and flawed Everyman of his time, and you must find yourself on his side.
The central conceit of Peacock makes for an interesting update to a time-old conceit. Paying someone to pretend to like you is as old as society itself, but this is a little different. In these deeply alienated times, the illusion of companionship is more tricky, more intricate and more nuanced. The film feels bang up to date in how it riffs on this, and again, all without hammering that theme home. People spend so much time now seeing brief flashes of end points; they see people crossing the line, raising the cup or getting the diploma, refracted through social media platforms which can’t accommodate all of the hard work and effort which gets people to that point. As a result, people just see other people seemingly winning. Perhaps they resent that they can’t also be at that point. Well, yes they can – vicariously! Matthias and his company are there to weave these illusions. Subtly, the script alludes to consumerism, influencers, online reviews and other new routes towards ‘keeping up appearances’; even in its world of muted lighting, airy apartments and exclusive restaurants, we see a world which is also competitive, cynical and superficial.
Peacock is a really enjoyable, engaging, light-touch comedy of manners which also manages a good balance of more profound points. Well acted and well made, it eschews the nightmarish to both poke fun at our modern-day obsessions, and to suggest that there is something better out there, if you will just let yourself grasp it. As the first feature-length film from director and writer Bernhard Wenger, it proves that he’s had no issues whatsoever scaling up from the short film projects which he has made to date. Peacock is a delight.
Peacock (2024) will feature at this year’s WatchAUT Film Festival. For more information, click here. It will also receive its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival.