A bleakly hilarious farce with undertones of surreal body-horror, A Different Man is an audacious comic takedown of tyrannical beauty standards, the social conditioning that creates them, and the routine cruelty inflicted on those deemed to fall outside them. Peppered with self-conscious nods to Cyrano de Bergerac and Beauty and the Beast, indie auteur Aaron Schimberg’s third feature is deadly serious but never preachy. Carefully couching socially awkward issues in self-aware irony, the Chicago-born writer-director mostly sustains a tragicomic tone that ferquently invokes Charlie Kaufman’s signature brand of dystopian glumcore absurdism.
Backed by feted indie-horror powerhouse A24 and heavyweight producer Christine Vachon’s Killer Films, A Different Man certainly has classy credentials and solid potential to turn potentially challenging material into buzz-driven, word-of-mouth success. At its Sundance world premiere last month, Schimberg’s twisted fairy tale divided critics but earned mostly positive reviews. In an unusual double booking, it also screens in competition at the Berlinale later this week.
Initially acting behind an elaborate mask, Marvel regular Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a minor-league actor with a medical condition that has left him with heavily disfgured facial features (superbly realised prosthetics by Batman veteran Mike Marino here). Shunned as an unsightly outcast by neighbours, and routinely mocked by strangers on the street, Edward lives a gloomy, solitary life in a crumbling New York City apartment. His rare acting roles are dispiritingly narrow, typically playing disabled office workers who are treated with pity and condescension in corporate diversity training videos.
But Edward’s fortunes take a dramatic turn thanks to two momentous developments. Firstly, aspiring playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) moves into the apartment next door and develops an instant, flirtatious, almost stalker-ish interest in her shy neighbour. Norwegian Reinsve, making her English-language debut, appears to be riffing on her insufferable persona in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021) here. Meanwhile, Edward’s doctors begin treating his condition with a revolutionary new therapy that triggers a radical metamorphosis. In icky. gooey transformation scenes that play like homages to David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), which Schimberg cites as a key influence on A Different Man, Edward begins peeling great bloody lumps of flesh from his disintegrating face.
Casting the striking attractive Stan as the reborn Edward was a smart, pointed choice by Schimberg and his team. Seizing on this bizarre rebirth, he cuts off all ties to his old self with a faked suicide, adopts a new persona under a new alias, then rewrites himself an entirely fresh life as a wealthy real estate dealer and highly sexed lothario.
The old Edward seems dead and buried, but he lives on in Ingrid’s imagination, as an off-Broadway play based on their brief friendship. The chance to audition for the lead, subtly reshaping Ingrid’s self-serving vision of his own former self, proves too tempting for Edward. He lands the role, which he then performs beneath a medical mask of his old face. He also begins a romance with Ingrid which reveals her amusingly kinky, festishistic side.
Inevitably, Edward’s super-successful new life comes with a steep price tag. Though he does not appear until midway through, the dramatic lynchpin of A Different Man is Adam Pearson, the British actor, broadcaster and campaigner best known for his brief but haunting scenes with Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin (2013). At an early age, Pearson was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type I, which causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on nerve tissue, creating abnormally swollen and misshapen facial features.
Schimberg previously cast Pearson in his film-business comedy Chained for Life (2018), a far more straightforward satire on attitudes to disability, beauty and representation on screen. This time around, the director specifically wrote a plum role for Pearson as Oswald, a jobbing British actor who treats his neurofibromatosis like a minor inconvenience in a life full of friends, social events and wide cultural interests. In a smart piece of dramatic symmetry, Oswald’s face closely resembles how Edward’s looked before his miracle cure. Indeed, the upbeat Brit seems uniquely well-suited to star in the play, as Ingrid soon realises.
Before long, Edward is wrestling with the surreal, Kaufman-esque trauma of being fired from playing himself in a version of his own life story, to be replaced by the far more genial, humble and confident Oswald. While the more disabled actor sails through life with self-effacing charm and positivity, his ultra-handsome rival is a resentful and entitled wreck, his unhinged narcissism spiralling into volatile, vengeful, extreme behaviour.
A lesser film would have weaponised these ironic reversals in a schematic way: as trite homilies about beauty being only skin deep, the perils of judging on appearances, being careful what you wish for, and so on. Schimberg’s pay-offs are much more nuanced and disquieting than that, meting out punishments and rewards like random cosmic punchlines. Even if A Different Man lightly scolds viewers for our unexamined complicity in oppressive beauty norms, Schimberg also prods away at more prickly, personal, complex themes here too. For example, the exploitative voyeurism of well-intentioned artists, himself included, or the patronising representation of disabled characters as saintly victims with no depth or agency. A late cameo by Michael Shannon, playing himself, adds an extra meta-comic layer.
There is a lot to unpack in A Different Man, and not all of it makes for comfortable viewing. Schimberg seems keen to unsettle his audience, daring us to react with disgust at our fellow humans, mocking our hollow claims of empathy. This boundary-testing, mildly confrontational edge may alienate some viewers. The film’s increasingly outlandish plot twists do not bear much scrutiny outside the rules of nightmarish farce while Wyatt Garfield’s long-take, crash-zoom camerawork wobbles in places. But for those of us who like our comedies bleak and bitter, Schimberg has constructed a thrillingly original, delciously dark hall of mirrors.
Director, screenwriter: Aaron Schimberg
Cast: Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, Renate Reinsve
Cinematography: Wyatt Garfield
Editing : Taylor Levy
Music: Umberto Smerilli
Production design: Anna Kathleen
Make-up: Mike Marino, Sarah Graalman
Producers: Christine Vachon, Vanessa McDonnell, Gabriel Mayers
Production companies: A24 (US), Killer Films (US), Grand Motel Films (US)
World sales: A24
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In English
112 minutes
