PEACOCK (PFAU – BIN ICH ECHT?) had its UK premiere at Glasgow Film Festival as part of this year’s Country Focus on Austrian cinema. It’s an entertaining film fitting into a subgenre niche of satirical European comedies alongside Ruben Östlund’s films. PEACOCK carries some interesting and weighty themes around performance and neurodivergence, which are interestingly explored but perhaps not as fully as they could be.
Matthias (Albrecht Schuch) is a blank slate. He works for MyCompanion, a trendy business that provides people who will pretend to be partners, children, or friends. Matthias is their best employee, adept at pretending to be someone else. He’s so good at being whoever his clients need him to be that his girlfriend, Sophia (Julia Franz Richter), sees him slipping away into blankness and confronts him with the accusation that he’s no longer real.
The premise of renting people to fill social roles resembles Werner Herzog’s FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC or Yorgos Lanthimos’ ALPS. Still, Bernhard Wenger, the film’s writer and director, takes the film in a different direction. Stylistically, he adopts a European satirical comedy tone in the vein of Ruben Östlund, Ernst De Geer, or even Joachim Trier. The strangeness of Matthias’ situation is played for deadpan laughs in a way that heightens the sense of performance at the heart of the film.
Wenger distinguishes his take on the premise with a strong focus on Matthias rather than the people who hire Matthias to be their companion. The focus on Matthias’ experience of performing his day-to-day life and being passively driven by the people around him unveils itself as an interesting, if undeveloped, metaphor for neurodivergence, whereby Matthias frequently appears to present as Autistic. In one particularly fascinating scene, Matthias uses fake tears that he keeps for work before an emotional confrontation with his girlfriend so that he will appear more authentically human. It’s a striking visual metaphor for the masking that neurodivergent people have to do to survive in a neurotypical world, and it’s a shame that the film doesn’t do more with that thematic strand.
“The premise of renting people to fill social roles resembles Werner Herzog’s FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC or Yorgos Lanthimos’ ALPS. Still, Bernhard Wenger, the film’s writer and director, takes the film in a different direction.”
Matthias’ inner life is also visually represented through his minimalist home and the modern conveniences that make his existence frictionless. He has smart devices in his home to turn on lights and play music, and he frequently talks to his car to ask for its various functions. There’s an element of satirical social commentary in this sense of anomie and blankness that develops through his regular interactions with robots rather than people. Matthias is as blank as the robots with which he surrounds himself.
This emphasis on robotic interactions is contrasted against the film’s central thematic preoccupation with performance, particularly the humanness of performance. Everything about Matthias’ life is a performance, from his work roles as loyal son, argumentative husband, or intelligent companion, to his homelife where he’s passive to the point of expressing no opinions at all. Wenger surrounds Matthias with performances: musical performances, performance art pieces, and the day-to-day performativity of people colliding and interacting in the real world. It’s ultimately witnessing performance and the artistic power of performance that pushes Matthias to genuine emotional expression in a scene at a performance art show that feels very Östlund-esque but without Östlund’s satirical bite. As the film concludes, it feels like it has pulled its punches a little.