Peacock (Pfau – Bin ich echt?, 2025) Movie Review: Bernhard Wenger’s Tragicomedy about a Rent-A-Friend Employee Analyzes the Depths of Human Experience

Bernhard Wenger’s feature film debut, “Peacock” (Original Title: “Pfau – Bin ich echt?,” 2025), takes a satirical approach to follow a professional actor who struggles to be himself in real life. The actor belongs to a specific service industry strain, which sounds like a capitalist invention to help people with loneliness, even if the service he provides has been in place in Japan for a couple of decades. He serves as a platonic companion for anyone and everyone in need, whether you are a 10-year-old child looking for his father at a PTA meeting, a woman looking for a date for an event, or an old couple looking for their estranged son. That is essentially his job at a “rent-a-friend” agency: pretend to be someone else for a limited period of time.

The said actor, Matthias (Albrecht Schuch), is their most in-demand friend-for-hire resource, which makes him virtually indispensable. The agency operates as peacefully as any corporate entity appears to work from the outside. That’s why he turns into yet another corporate employee, where achieving efficacy through amicability is his workplace strength — rather than his creative merit. Wenger doesn’t address similar systemic concerns head-on. Instead, he focuses on Matthias’s turmoil stemming from a clear case of existential crisis. His girlfriend, Sophia (Julia Franz Richter), worries that he has forgotten how to be himself, as he wonders how that is remotely possible.

Wenger uses Matthias’s cluelessness to the apparent reality for humor, which seems more in line with Ruben Östlund’s directorial style, especially in “Force Majeure.” There’s a reason why the Hollywood remake of Östlund’s film was a creative failure. It mistook what made the original funny and used a marriage-on-the-verge-of-failing plotline for its usual comedic tirade, overlooking the subtext that the original conveys simply through its clever blocking choices. Wenger places his characters similarly in the frames or moves them around. He also uses the awkwardness of situations for humor. That cringe-laden comedy approach makes one of its moments eerily similar to a crucial point in Östlund’s “The Square.”

Yet, the buffoon, literal and figurative, in Wenger’s film, is the protagonist, whose otherwise well-mannered appearance hides his real-life frustrations. As an actor, he is ideally supposed to understand the depths of the human condition, but the act of switching between different roles leaves him paralyzed, unable to access emotions as a regular human being. It invites a discussion about his acting process and whether it’s simply about putting on appearances based on descriptive insights. While some acting disciplines focus on similar external details about characters, be it voice or mannerisms, their process is still ‘outside-in,’ meaning finding an emotional truth through the act of walking in someone else’s shoes.

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The sheer act of role-playing should ideally lead to a finer understanding of the qualms of humanity. Yet, the issue with Matthias is not simply a case of a self-obsessed actor’s blissful ignorance. In fact, in this case, he is hardly an actor, but a severely overworked employee who has lost touch with himself. Wenger cleverly taps into this notion to address Matthias’s agony, seeing his life falling apart. It also helps that Albrecht Schuch is enchanting as this outwardly goofy man, whose anxieties remain tucked inside him. Schuch makes us realize the subtle difference between those concerns being ignored and them being consciously buried in the mind for Matthias — to keep functioning adequately in a mode of living that he has become attuned to.

The distinction is crucial for a script that follows a man’s journey of self-actualization. Schuch turns him into an irresistible presence on the screen, even when Wenger focuses on the absurdist portrayal of his idiocy. The German actor doesn’t turn this character into a caricature devoid of sensibilities. Instead, his compassionate performance urges us to consider Matthias a man we should be deeply concerned about. It all helps the film become a richer character study of a man’s emotional crisis while contemplating the marriage of art and business in the current age and the gradual decay of genuine human connection.

The issue, however, remains that “Peacock” doesn’t cut nearly as deep as a satire about human experience. Perhaps it’s because filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos or Luis Buñuel have set the bar too high in using similar stylistic details with a layered insight into their subject matters. Wenger’s film falls short in that regard. While the gags are still piercing and laced with emotional irony, this tragicomedy lacks the bite of a sharp, lacerating satire. Instead, it works as a deeply resonating portrait of an emotionally unstable man on a healing journey.

Bernhard Wenger’s ‘Peacock (Pfau – Bin ich echt?)’ is Austria’s submission for the Best International Feature Film award at the 2026 Oscars.

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Peacock (Pfau – Bin ich echt?, 2025) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Letterboxd
Peacock (Pfau – Bin ich echt?, 2025) Movie Cast: Albrecht Schuch, Julia Franz Richter, Anton Noori, Theresa Frostad Eggesbø
Peacock (Pfau – Bin ich echt?, 2025) Movie Runtime: 1h 42m, Genre: Drama/Comedy

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