Glasgow Film Festival: Peacock

Bernhard Wenger’s debut feature is a really strong first film, even if it never quite shakes off convention the way it would like.

Matthias (Albrecht Schuch) is an actor. Sort of. He is, in effect, an actor for real life scenarios. Single but need a convincing boyfriend to get that couples-only flat? Hire Matthias. Need a pilot for a dad so you’ve got the most exciting parent at class career day? He’s right there.

It’s an existence he excels at, chameleonic in his ability to be perfect for the given scenario. However, shock horror; there’s issues. His girlfriend Sophia (Julia Franz Richter) increasingly thinks he’s barely human, such is his spinelessness and absence of emotion, and it’s an opinion that’s beginning to ring true for Matthias as well. When she leaves him, his life, in its achingly constructed artifice, beings to tumble into free fall.

It’s a strong set-up, stronger still for the fact that it begins at the point where a more formulaic film would take two-thirds of its runtime to reach. Instead, once Sophia has gone (within the first act), we witness Matthias’s increasingly desperate attempts to find meaning and animate his life once more, and we follow him as he circles the drain. Schuch is magnificent in bringing this to life, the slipping of his mask that occurs throughout the film is beautifully done. Matthias’s real emotions slip out and land on his face like bombs, and the conflicting ripples of confusion, terror and pride that engulf him for a split second after a feeling are perfectly judged.

The neutered, Instagrammable world he wanders is brilliantly drawn, and Wenger has a keen eye for the straining self-importance that only finds bleakness that makes up so much of the world we have created. From yoga retreats to the show-home that happens to have a person in it that is his house, special mention must go to Katharina Haring’s brilliant work on the Peacock, who gets some of the film’s biggest laughs with her production design.

Matthias’s trials in this middle-class purgatory include getting an ill-advised daft little dog, being stalked by someone his acting got dumped, and a misjudged flirtation with Ina (Theresa Frostad Eggesbø), a fellow dweller of privileged ennui. The latter is particularly well done, subverting and satirising both his and the audience’s manic-pixie dream girl fantasies, building them up to give them the unceremonious kicking they deserve.

Comparisons have been made to Yorgos Lanthimos and Ruben Östlund, the former of which is just the kind of lazy shite PR companies have taken to saying if a comedy is deadpan and has a certain stillness; that said, I’m sure Aki Kaurismäki can breathe a sigh of relief to no longer have his name pinned on every comedy with an expressionless protagonist. The latter comparison though is more interesting.

The film takes place in a similar state of bourgeoise malaise as Östlund’s recent films have, but where Östlund comes from a place of nihilistic contempt (at his worst, totally adolescently so) for everyone involved in these worlds he depicts, Wenger never stops caring about his characters. Matthias is, for all his faults, by no means a monster; he just exists in a society that encourages his behaviour, and has up until now rewarded him for it.

This compassion for its characters is a key strength of Peacock, but also the thing that stops the film from being truly excellent. In its empathy and wanting the best for Matthias, Peacock allows him redemption, not innately a bad thing, but the manner of its arrival feels contrived, a weak moment of cliché in a film that had up until then mocked it.

-Joe Creely-