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Aaron Schimberg’s new film is a bundle of gambits that should be incompatible, but the stitching is so mischievous it’ll make you shriek
5/5
Even if you knew in advance exactly what happens in Aaron Schimberg’s new film, I’m not sure you’d be prepared for any of it. A Different Man is a bundle of gambits and tones that should be completely incompatible: part absurdist black comedy, part Kafkaesque dragon-punch to the soul, part Jekyll-and-Hyde morality tale turned inside out. Yet all of these snippets have been sewn into an addictively mad and unpredictable whole, and some of the stitching is so mischievous it made me shriek.
Cashing in some hard-earned post-Marvel artistic freedom points, Sebastian Stan gets the juiciest gig of his career as Edward, an aspiring actor with a rare genetic disorder that has left his face buried beneath a tumorous mask. He lives and works in New York City, and while the film is set in the present, the place is as rackety and loose as it was in the 1970s output of John Cassavetes. (Characters are always hammering on each other’s front doors, and I do mean hammering.)
Initially, Edward can only snag jobs that are in some way “about” his condition, which has also left him understandably wary of all social contact – even with Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), the attractive and affectionate playwright next door, who promises to write him a rich and layered lead part. But then a ray of hope pushes through: a local hospital is looking for volunteers to undergo a new, experimental treatment – which, if successful, will cause his growths to liquify and his “true” face to emerge, as if from a gooey chrysalis.
So he tries. And it works! But the new life into which Edward hatches is anything but butterfly-bright. Because suddenly, fluttering into the picture comes Oswald (Adam Pearson), a gregarious British expat with exactly the same condition Edward just sloughed off – and whose life seems, if anything, all the jollier for it. In a magnificently played, cruelly funny scene when the pair first meet, Edward suddenly realises most of the hardships he’d blamed on his ailment had, in fact, been optional all along. The camera catches Stan’s expression, and in his eyes, you can somehow watch his stomach drop.
Schimberg has worked with Pearson (who himself has neurofibromatosis) before: he wrote the 2019 backstage drama Chained for Life, with the actor in mind after seeing him fall prey to Scarlett Johansson on a night bus in Under the Skin. Like that earlier film, A Different Man mulls how cinema – and art more broadly – deals with disfigurement, but has even more fun holding its audience’s toes to the coals.
Take the special effects make-up Stan wears to play Edward pre-treatment. It’s astonishingly lifelike. Yet after he’s “cured”, and Ingrid makes good on that promise of a part, Edward finds himself wearing a rubber prosthesis on stage in rehearsals, and the effect is ridiculous: a merciless send-up of the “transformative role”.
Indeed, Schimberg brilliantly anticipates every ethical qualm you might have, and every artistic parallel you might spot from Beauty and the Beast to The Elephant Man, and lobs them all back at the audience like water bombs. (There is a glorious scene in which every obvious talking point is rattled off by a theatre-bar blowhard in the space of three minutes.) Even lovely Ingrid, who at first seems too good and gorgeous to be true, turns out to be a bit of a self-serving twerp. But is she really? Isn’t she just trying her best?
That’s how this stuff works, Schimberg’s film chuckles. When faced with faces like Edward’s, it can be hard to parse reactions and motives, even our own. A Different Man doesn’t simply recognise that messiness – it makes it into a joyride.
15 cert, 112 min; in cinemas from Friday October 4
4/5
English