Peacock (2024) - Movie review

Matthias works for a renting company. Whether you need a ideal son to impress your colleagues or someone to train you to argue, rent Matthias, a master at pretending to be someone else. However his true challenge comes when he needs to be himself.

The first thing I noticed when watching this movie was the remarkable use of the sound. From the beginning it allows the viewer to dive into the movie by creating a strong ambience.

If you pay attention to it, you can have a better understanding of the movie and it compliments well what you can see to reinforce emotions. For example, whenever Matthias goes in his costume room at night, the same theme can be heard, putting an emphasis on the alienating power of his job.

In addition to the sound, the colors are great tools when it comes to create a strong and immersive atmosphere and it is particularly well done in Peacock.

Matthias' house is where he doesn't have to pretend, it creates a rupture with the outside world where he works. In his house Matthias can be himself, but here's the problem : he can't. His struggle to be himself is evidently due to his job. After pretending to be someone else for a long time, he doesn't remember who he is or how he is supposed to act because his work is centered around acting according to other people's expectations.

His job is alienating and he starts to play a role in his own intimacy until his girlfirend breaks up and leaves him alone in his house.

However his house is sanitized, blank, as if it was coming straight out of an Ikea magazine (which makes me remember of the begining of Fight Club), dysfunctionning and has an apparent lack of personnality which is a great depiction of the way he feels.

Moreover, the costume room perfectly depicts the alienating power of his job and its intrusion into his personal life.

Contemporary art in Peacock is often associated with nudity which I found interesting because it is almost in total opposition with Matthias' job. Matthias has to embody someone else at work, he has a whole costume room and the emotions he displays aren't his. However, the contemporary art show he attends to is completely different. The artist is naked, reveals himself trough his own emotions and has to be himself in order to create.

I also found the symbolism behind the genre (both drama and comedy) and the title of the movie to be very interesting, but for those subjects this interview of Peacock's director Bernhard Wenger is probably more pertinent than what I could say about it.

I really enjoyed this movie and would recommand anyone to watch it !! ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )

(also I very much appreciate when movies end up with a sequence shot)⋆˚꩜｡