Peacock(2025)

The moustachioed “Matthias” (Albrecht Schuch) works for a business that rents him out. Not for sex, but for just about everything else and he’s good at it. From a companion at a posh concert to a gay lover to a gent who pretends to be a son so he can help his “dad” get to be president of his golf club, he can turn his hand to most things with aplomb. Except, that is, in his perfectly styled home where he and girlfriend “Sophia” (Julia Franz Richter) are having troubles. She is fed up with the mundane sterility of their life and with him becoming more and more subsumed by his vocation. When she finally ups sticks, she leaves him having to deal with quite an existential crisis that causes him to completely reevaluate his life. What isn’t helping is the disgruntled husband of one of his “assignments” as he - “Johann” (Branko Samarovski) - is looking for his own pound of flesh and is no mean umbrella wielder! Perhaps a rural retreat might help? Well there he reunites with “Ina” (Theresa Frostad Eggesbø) whom he met on a previous job and who seems to take the same approach to the meditation lawn as he does (and probably we do, too!). In the end, though, his ordered life has been thoroughly upset and as his last and biggest task looms, maybe “Matthias” is facing his Waterloo? Some of the dialogue here is genuinely funny as the scenarios poke collective fun at pomposity, stupidity and at so much of society’s other, snobbish and preposterous, emperor’s new clothes attitudes. Schuch manages to keep a straight face throughout much of this and that - and as we come to the film’s coup de grâce, is actually quite an achievement. It’s a successful spoof of cinema genres across the board as well as one on human behaviour and I’m no dog lover, so that bit worked for me too! This is good fun.