It’s been a pivotal year for Sebastian Stan, who — after 13 years of MCU films (and counting) — has made a compelling, go-for-broke pivot into indie cinema with two meaty leading roles.
Earlier this month, he donned one of history’s most infamous blonde wigs to play Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s 1970s biopic, The Apprentice. With A Different Man, he commits to a different transformation altogether as Edward, an actor living with neurofibromatosis: a rare genetic disorder that manifests as a spread of benign tumours on his face.
Despite being a capable performer, Edward finds himself relegated to undignified bit parts specifically aimed at those with a “unique and unusual physiognomy”.
His new, sweetly oblivious neighbour Ingrid (Renate Reinsve; The Worst Person in the World), pries open his otherwise solitary personal life in ways both hilarious and horrifying. An aspiring playwright herself, they bond over their creative struggles, though the extent to which she shares his romantic interest is vague.
Initially presented as a wry portrait of isolation and disability, A Different Man finds itself methodically escalating into pitch-black psychodrama when Edward begins an experimental treatment that promises to alleviate him of his condition.
Stan’s consummate performance extends well beyond the sort of laboured mimicry that tends to get mistaken for dramatic skill. His wilting physicality carries a man entombed in his own anxiety, sealed by the othering gazes of friends and strangers alike.
So detailed are his prosthetics (designed by The Penguin’s make-up maestro, Michael Marino), viewers going in cold may not even realise who they’re watching.
The trial proves to be a success, if not without its own gruesome tribulations. Edward’s face agonisingly stretches and peels off in mangled globs; much of the process is spent screaming and keeled over in bed.
Unlike, say, The Substance — another recent movie centred on a miraculous cosmetic procedure — the bursts of body horror are fleeting and generally incidental, as opposed to being a juvenile, droning obsession.
The film is closer aligned with John Frankenheimer’s 1966 existential thriller, Seconds; when Edward metamorphoses into a man with Sebastian Stan’s enviable movie-star features, he fakes his own death and begins life anew, only to encounter an internal malaise less easily cured.
His makeover is accompanied by a new-found swagger and a voice more recognisably in Stan’s register. The new Edward (under the objectively hilarious alias of Guy) thrives as a real estate agent, his sculpted face now plastered on billboards and subway ads; for the first time in his life, he invites and celebrates his own objectification, even as it erodes his personhood.
When Guy discovers a casting call for a new play written by Ingrid – titled Edward, no less — he auditions for the main character role, despite no longer looking the part. Life becomes stranger than autofiction upon the arrival of Oswald (Adam Pearson; Under the Skin) — another actor with a strikingly similar resemblance to Edward, who also vies for a part he was seemingly born to play.
While Stan’s dual performance is the spectacular centrepiece of A Different Man, the film’s true breakout star arguably ends up being Pearson, an actor and campaigner who lives with neurofibromatosis in real life.
Last seen in writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s previous film, Chained for Life (2018), he practically levitates on screen as the radiantly happy-go-lucky Oswald. His chummy, unselfconscious charm enlivens a character who’s far more comfortable in his skin than Edward or Guy has ever been; a doppelganger of sorts who unwittingly contorts Guy’s life into a delirious torment.
Schimberg is too canny a writer to let the film fall into broad aphorisms concerning confidence and self-image. He attentively homes in on the everyday indignities inflicted on Edward, whose permanently defensive, diminutive stature forms a much-needed safety mechanism.
Oswald may be precisely configured as Edward’s mirror opposite to amusing extreme — he’s well-liked, romantically attuned, and talented (the film makes a running joke out of his numerous hobbies) — but Schimberg notes how his own defences make him susceptible to a less overt exploitation.
Wyatt Garfield’s 16mm cinematography becomes central to evoking the film’s identity crisis; with drawn-out, inquisitive movements, the camera mercilessly probes its subjects, often squashing Edward within the confines of the frame, or conjuring simmering resentment from sparse compositions. (In contrast, the camera revolves around Oswald’s centre of gravity.)
Umberto Smerilli’s jazzy, foreboding score brilliantly matches the film’s mounting absurdity, descending into a soundscape best described as chaotic noir.
A Different Man also makes a few timely jabs at theatre, particularly in what it means for someone to authentically portray and embody disability – an in-built, perhaps too-aware acknowledgement of the film’s own potential pitfalls, and how stories about disability told by able-bodied creatives can suffer from intense, patronising projection.
The film remains bleakly funny throughout, lest anyone take its premise too literally; it’s one of the year’s finest explorations of identity, a slippery parable of dysmorphic horrors that takes our own biases and delusions to task.
After all, what’s in a face?
A Different Man is in cinemas now.