Peacock
aka Pfau - Bin ich echt? First screened in December 2025
Director: Bernhard Wenger. Cast: Albrecht Schuch, Julia Franz Richter, Anton Noori, Theresa Frostad Eggesbø, Maria Hofstätter, Branko Samarovski, Salka Weber. Screenplay: Bernhard Wenger. In Brief:
Wittily delivers expected farce of fragile identity but has more to say about stranded masculinities and no-exit societies.
VOR:③
Pointedly Germanic in some ways, more broadly European in others. Nice to see a comedy with ideas and an aesthetic, even if it's hardly a landmark.
A little like the recent German dramedy I'm Your Man, with Marin Eggert and Dan Stevens, the Austrian dramedy Peacock never achieves the full level of ingenuity and surprise of which its high-concept premise and its cast seem capable. But I did find the movie prickly and endearing, not so much for its literal plot about the spiral into permanent, helpless artifice by a professional decoy/impersonator (akin to what Brendan Fraser does in Rental Family) as for its Barbie-ish parable of what happens when avatars of photogenic cis-het whiteness discover that the world doesn't cash that particular check as quickly or unskeptically as it used to, such that its gleaming young avatars are consequently unsure of such basics as where to go, what to do, and who they even are. Like Barbie (eventually), Matthias gets the specific critiques of him filed by his newly-ex-girlfriend and intuits the impatience and indifference of the larger world to his long-postponed wakeup and newfound devaluation, but he's even more stymied than Barbie for an effective response.
Peacock is too generous to take full pleasure in Matthias's hangdog bewilderment but is ready and willing to make a range of good jokes at his flailing expense. That said, it also has some good tactics for sketching what a nascent epiphany might look like for a person in Matthias's admittedly exaggerated position. I appreciated the staging of its tentative yet pointed finale, which is neat and not-so-neat at the same time. And there are other story threads that pay more tonal and ethical dividends than I'd anticipated, including one about a woman who frees herself after decades from a hostile marriage and whose husband who feels a certain kind of way about that.
Peacock's visual style isn't quite innovative or all the way sophisticated, but at least it has one. I bet Ruben Östlund is a fan, and I equally bet that Yorgos Lanthimos thinks the movie could have gone way harder. As is increasingly true, I'm with Östlund. I couldn't quite tell if I was further out ahead of the movie's turns and semi-"twists" than the screenplay wanted or if that's actually part of Peacock's cringe-comic design. Either way, comedies of even moderate thematic and aesthetic ambition don't come around as often as they should, and I really enjoyed this one. Reader, I laughed. Extra points for being the first Austrian movie in the history of time that you could reasonably call a good time and a mood-lightener, even on a strikingly gruesome weekend. Grade:B
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
