‘Peacock’ Review: A Zingy Austrian Comedy Follows a Friend-For-Hire In Desperate Need of a Real Connection

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic Considerate, cultured, polite, patient, a good listener, easy on the eye: Matthias is the kind of man almost anyone would be glad to have as company.

In turn, he’s glad to be company to almost anyone: a middle-aged singleton seeking a date to a classical concert, an elderly married woman who can’t talk to her husband, a man his age who needs a fake boyfriend to secure an apartment lease.

Just because he’s getting paid for his companionship in all these situations doesn’t mean he treats them with less care than he would any of his own, uncommissioned relationships — which might be a problem, he realizes, by the time his girlfriend walks out on him, exasperatedly saying that he “doesn’t seem real anymore.” That pithy remark sends Matthias into a tailspin, a crisis of selfhood, that gives Bernhard Wenger‘s superb black comedy “Peacock” its unpredictable arc.

An auspiciously polished and snappy debut from its Austrian writer-director, this Venice Critics’ Week highlight has already racked up robust sales in major territories on the strength of its sparkling, readily translatable satire and quicksilver leading turn by Albrecht Schuch — the German star who made an international impression with his BAFTA-nominated performance in “All Quiet on the Western Front.” With its seemingly absurd premise actually inspired by a real-life boom in rent-a-friend agencies in Japan, this reflection on Insta-lifestyle micro-management and faltering human connection in an age of social-network overload is sufficiently smart and distinctive to weather unavoidable comparisons to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos and particularly Ruben Östlund.