A Different Man is a noir-inflected black comedy about the adage, popularized by Truman Capote and attributed to Teresa of Ávila, that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. Indie filmmaker Aaron Schimberg’s third feature depicts an odd and volatile love triangle between two men with facial deformities and a woman who admires them both. The film is dazzling and dark fun even as it ultimately fails to live up to its full potential.
The protagonist is Edward (a strong Sebastian Stan in prosthetic makeup), a lonely youngish man who lives in a dilapidated New York apartment building. Edward has neurofibromatosis, which causes tumors that have severely distorted his face and made him ashamed of how he looks. His daily life entails constant indignity. Strangers startle and recoil when they see him or, conversely, feel entitled to a presumptuous familiarity — cornering him in bars to ask questions about his condition, lecturing him in hallways about maintaining a positive outlook, and the like.
Edward is interested in acting, but his experience has been limited to portraying disabled co-workers in corporate sensitivity training videos. The whole universe, including inanimate objects, seems determined to humiliate and relegate him to his already very cloistered existence. When he tries to fix a water leak in his apartment ceiling, a dead rat falls on him. However, life abruptly changes when a new neighbor named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve, a Norwegian actress best known for 2021’s The Worst Person in the World) moves into his building. Ingrid, an aspiring writer, is friendly and beautiful and takes a kindly interest in Edward. He’s soon completely smitten, but he doesn’t dare to believe he would ever have a shot with her. His doctors, however, tell him of an experimental surgery that might be able to heal his condition permanently and give him a “normal” appearance.
Edward elects to try the surgery. Over several days, chunks of flesh fall from his face — a process the film depicts with a David Cronenberg-esque relish for body horror, a not-so-subtle suggestion that this transformation is the real grotesquery. In a conventional sci-fi or thriller film, the surgery would go disastrously wrong. Here, the surgery works. It succeeds, in fact, beyond Edward’s wildest dreams, revealing a man who is not only “normal” looking but quite handsome. He makes an impulsive and fateful decision: Without telling Ingrid or anyone else, he disappears from his apartment and allows the world to believe that he has died.
Flash forward in time. Edward has a new name, a successful new career, girlfriends, and a fancy loft apartment. One day, he is walking through New York when he spies Ingrid. He follows her to an off-Broadway theater, where she is holding a casting call for a play that sounds suspiciously like it’s about Edward. He asks Ingrid, who doesn’t recognize him, to let him read for the main part. He knocks it out of the park, with everyone impressed at his ability somehow to ventriloquize the experience of a disabled and disfigured man.
Then comes the second irony. An actor named Oswald turns up. Oswald (played with panache by Adam Pearson, a British actor and campaigner with neurofibromatosis who worked with Schimberg on his previous film, 2019’s Chained for Life) has a facial disfigurement. He’s also charismatic and charming, a mensch who is the life of every room, and he is at ease with his illness in a way Edward never was. Ingrid and the theater crew start wondering if it would be better to do their play with someone who has actually lived with the disability. Edward, in All About Eve style, feels threatened — but can’t bring himself to admit his secret.
A Different Man is well-paced, shot through with a certain grimy New York authenticity, and extremely funny. One wry running gag involves people telling Edward his new name, Guy, sounds made up, and another concerns his inability to pull off a convincing British accent. (There’s also an implication that Ingrid’s artistic altruism is really just a sublimated fetish.) Schimberg’s zest for irony and double identities recalls some of Billy Wilder and a lot of Charlie Kaufman, who in films such as Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) has explored twists and turns arising from similarly clever premises. Edward’s predicament put me in mind of Adaptation’s neurotic and self-loathing screenwriter protagonist played by Nicolas Cage, who gets mired in a hopelessly convoluted script while his happy-go-lucky twin brother wins everyone over with his cheesy ideas.
As Edward’s frustrations mount, his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. So does A Different Man, in a sense. Where its first two acts are basically faultless — you might assign them to students in a screenwriting seminar — problems start in the final stretch. Some of these are plot holes or questions of character motivation that make it harder to suspend disbelief: Why doesn’t Edward just confess his real identity to Ingrid once the new dynamic becomes clear? And why do Ingrid and Oswald tolerate Edward even as his behavior becomes more and more unhinged?
The real and larger problem, I think, is that the story seems too content with milking Edward’s upstaging by Oswald for every possible darkly comic note without advancing the story or ideas further or allowing the comedy to take a backseat to a climax of real human drama, as a more typical dramedy would. This makes the film’s third act feel a bit repetitive and sputtering, as well as simply mean-spirited. The film is, nonetheless, one of the more original and exciting I’ve seen in a long time.
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J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
