I'm not sure why this has such a low rating. It's not perfect, or a mind-blowing experience or something, but I thought it was a really interesting story, well-acted, especially with a wonderful performance by Cillian Murphy. It's sort of a Psycho-like story, without ever venturing into suspense or horror.
It's about an incredibly socially inept, anxiety-ridden young man named John, whose mother has died a year previously and he's been traumatized/psychologically damaged by the loss. He seems to have been both coddled/protected and smothered/extremely isolated by his mother's hermetic, semi-abusive love. She was all he had, exactly because of the way she raised him and formed his relationship to the world. Her upbringing of him, and also to a smaller extent her subsequent death/taking away of herself, both contributed to cripple him in his relationships with others. Not that much is revealed about her even by the end, and I would have liked to know more.
Cillian Murphy is so interesting and engaging to watch as the Willardesque character John, and the completely different female character, Emma, who is mild, benignant, with a quiet strength. I didn't ever not sympathize with Emma, even though I knew she was calculating. I pitied John, whose face is like a parade of his shifting emotions: his neurotic shyness, anxiety, almost childlike anger, and emotional frustration.
Cillian even looks different as John; he changes his appearance through his acting: through the way John purses his lips, carries his body, and his nervous facial tics, etc. (you will see what I mean when you see it). When he's Emma, he also looks different in accordance with her different personality. It's not like anything I've ever seen before! He must be doing something right, to be playing a character so different from his usual self, and two characters who are so different from each other, in such a thoroughgoing, immersive way as to be utterly convincing as each. It's like he completely becomes John, and then becomes Emma, and neither is at all "Cillian."
I think this movie deserves at least a 7. Some people have said that the story isn't that credible, but I didn't find anything wrong or that off about it (it's just that it doesn't really explain everything about his mother or her "true" nature, ultimately), and the protagonist himself is the driving force behind the movie, as he should be. Besides, it's a shame when people can't suspend their disbelief just a little when it's not really that central to the point of the movie and recognize the merit of it. I couldn't help thinking that maybe some people just don't like to see Cillian Murphy in a more humbling or "weird" role, and that's why they didn't enjoy it more.
I think a better title would have been "Emma," it's simple yet it really suits the movie and makes more of a point than "Peacock," which doesn't really evoke anything apart from just being the name of the town.
