Movie Review and Trailer for The Peacock (2023)

The mood is already low when the tour group, under the supervision of their boss Linda Bachmann (Lavinia Wilson), arrives at the sprawling estate of Lord Hamish (Philip Jackson) and Lady Fiona Macintosh (Victoria Carling). Only beam man Jim Wellmann (Jürgen Vogel with false teeth) has the adequate lift for the wet and cold Scottish weather in his luggage. His colleagues Bernhard Toschner (Serkan Kaya), Andreas Voigt (Tom Schilling) and David Wächter (David Kross) seem out of place in their fine thread. None of them feel like going “offsite”, as a conference outside of the business premises is called in Businessspeak. A takeover by another bank is imminent, jobs are at stake and one could be out of a job by the end of the weekend.

This starting point is splendid for a successful comedy: disgruntled Monetenscheffler in unfamiliar surroundings and in direct competition with one another promise a great deal Fish-out-of-water-Moments and knives sharpened from behind. The cook Helen (Annette Frier), who was specially brought from Germany, and the seminar leader Rebecca (Svenja Jung) are added as disruptive factors. While one ridicules the aloof concerns of the big capitalists with their typical down-to-earthness, the other throws the suit wearers out of their concept with infantile group games. Not to be forgotten is the animal that gives the novel and film its name and is supposed to provide thrilling thrills: a peacock gone mad that soon lies dead on the lawn and keeps a whole subplot of the story going.

So much for the promising starting position, now for its less than convincing implementation. The first thing that strikes you is how little director Lutz Heineking jr., who also wrote the screenplay, and his two co-authors Christoph Mathieu and Sönke Andresen make of it. From the mere fact that the luxury hotels get used to bankers in a poorly heated mansion not only having to share a bunk bed with a colleague, but also the bathroom in the hallway and that they wear the completely wrong clothes for group exercises in the forest, other authors would have cascaded let the situation comedy bubble over. In the finished film, both only serve to turn up your nose for a moment. Comedic capital is not made of it.

Incidentally, the film was not shot in Scotland (there are only a few shots of the journey from there), but in Belgium, which turns out to be another problem: the cinematic illusion does not exist from the outset. Both the architecture of the noble seat and the landscape around it are clearly non-Scottish. The Scottish hills, which rise around the noble estate, are easily identifiable as having been added later on the computer. Unfortunately, this does not contribute to a harmonious atmosphere.

The fact that the film was shot in neighboring Germany and not on the British Isles has financial and logistical reasons. “Belgium has very attractive film funding, and Wallonia is just around the corner from Cologne” (where the studio recordings took place), reveals the director in the film’s press kit. It remains a mystery why the plot of the film was not immediately moved to Belgium. The nationality of the main characters was finally adapted to German cinema audiences. An additional adaptation of the location would not only have preserved the cinematic illusion, but also avoided further improbabilities, such as the fact that both Linda Bachmann and the cook travel all the way from Frankfurt am Main or Cologne in their own cars.

The greatest failure of the screenplay trio, however, is not sufficiently exacerbating the supposedly criminalistic poultry situation. The question of who killed the lord’s favorite animal becomes superfluous after a few minutes when cook Helen, who serves as the film’s narrator, reveals it from the off. This not only kills the tension, the fact that the lord and lady have no problem at all with the peacock’s death takes away any drama and a large part of the comedy from the egg dance that three of the other characters are doing to cover up the peacock’s murder .

The script is full of such inconsistencies and poorly constructed motivations that are in the script solely to set further plots in motion. The fact that Linda Bachmann arrives in her own car is necessary to illustrate the madness of the peacock and to initiate its demise. A car rented at the airport (or, alternatively, the already mentioned relocation of the events to Belgium) would have done the trick. The fact that the lord leaves his hunting rifle in the forest, where banker Voigt later finds it and draws the wrong conclusions from it, is another example of lazy scriptwriting. Ironically, out of fear of being discovered by his two employees, the lord hides his gun. Anyone who believes it will be blessed – and has little imagination.

With a little more ingenuity, however, great things could have been done with the dead animal. Imagine if the peacock were not the Lord’s favorite animal, but that of the Lady and hated by the Lord for it; and that the lord had not shot the peacock at his wife’s behest but by accident, which of course the lady would never believe. Then not only would the lord’s motivation suddenly be right, to hide his gun from his employees and blame the murder of the peacock on someone else, the entire plot would also gain a completely different, convincing dynamic.

However, she is not convincing as she is. And the acting leaves a lot to be desired. First and foremost, Tom Schilling and David Kross, whose tense nerves aren’t relieved for a second, are disappointing. What ultimately remains are a lot of incredibility, missed opportunities and attempted humor, which is often more claimed to come from the mouth of the narrator than to actually be seen on the screen. A poultry thriller without the bite, tough and dry like a German roast chicken that has been on the grill for too long.