‘A Different Man’ is a Brilliantly Twisted Satire
The strange and original A Different Man treads a surprisingly thin line between comedy, romance, and gross-out thriller.
Sebastian Stan portrays just one man in Aaron Schimberg’s brilliantly twisted A Different Man, but he’s essentially two different characters, before and after a medical miracle.
Before, he is Edward, a struggling but determined actor in New York City, whom we meet clearly overacting a scene in some low-budget project. Edward also lives with neurofibromatosis, a condition that produces tumors and growths all over his face.
Edward is deeply insecure about his appearance and keeps to himself in a darkened, pretty spacious apartment. The leak in his ceiling, which he allows to fester and swell into a disgusting ooze, serves as Schimberg’s blunt visual motif of the malaise eating away at Edward. Umberto Smerilli’s baleful score sets his dread to music.
Then, a new neighbor barges into Edward’s life and inspires him to step ever so slightly outside of his festering loneliness. Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) is Ingrid, the aspiring playwright who moves in next door.
Unusually forward and charmingly loquacious, à la Annie Hall (which is obliquely referenced), she’s a down-to-earth pixie dream girl, rendered by Reinsve with truthful notes of self-confidence and intelligence. Ingrid doesn’t ignore Edward’s facial differences, but acts unbothered by his condition, and in fact, to Edward, she seems capable of looking past the surface so many strangers find alarming. She simply sees him.
A brief moment of physical contact inside his apartment, well-played by Stan and Reinsve, surges with awkwardness and attraction. It’s only a matter of time until Edward signs up for the first trial of a potentially life-changing cure for his condition, an experimental drug for physical modification that produces a painful transformation.
After the horror, and scenes of Edward, in excruciating pain, peeling off his old face, he emerges a new man (Stan, sans prosthetics), dubbing himself Guy. He almost immediately reaps the benefits of looking like a Marvel superhero.
The film, after using its first third to efficiently set up its cruel cosmic joke on Edward, then winds up to deliver the punchline. His name is Oswald, and out of nowhere, he barges into Guy’s happy, thriving new life to upset everything.
Played by Adam Pearson, an actor and disability activist who actually has neurofibromatosis, Oswald looks a lot like Edward/Guy before his procedure. But, despite living with similar deformities, he has a totally different disposition.
Oswald is a jovial, outgoing, indomitable force of positivity who, in practically every way, proves that Edward’s appearance wasn’t the thing holding him back. Maybe Edward was just a loser. And, conversely, just because Guy’s conventionally good-looking, that doesn’t guarantee he’ll now always get what he wants. He might end up being a loser, too.
Once it’s clear what the gag is, it’s a pleasure to watch Schimberg play it out to an extreme conclusion, aided greatly by Pearson, who starred in the filmmaker’s previous feature, Chained for Life.
Wryly funny as upbeat Oswald, he nearly steals the show as Guy’s unwitting nemesis goes blithely about being excellent at everything, rocking his kooky attire of loud prints and neckerchiefs. He’s a perfectly imperturbable foil for Stan, who ably carries the film’s stark shifts from deadpan wit to heartfelt drama into monster-movie gore.
And for an added measure of incisive humor, Pearson’s performance calls attention to the fact that this film didn’t cast an actor with neurofibromatosis to play Edward, but instead cast a pretty actor and put him in a mask — which, in a nice meta twist, is a point also raised about the casting of one of Ingrid’s plays that itself is inspired by Edward’s sweetly desperate desire to be a different man.
A Different Man (★★★★☆) is rated R, and is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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