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DIRECTED BY: Aaron Schimberg

FEATURING: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson

PLOT: Edward, an aspiring actor who suffers from disfiguring facial tumors, is cured by an experimental treatment and starts a new life; he then seeks to be cast in a play about his previous life, but becomes jealous when the charismatic, disfigured Oswald—a better actor and a better fit for the part—enters the scene.

COMMENTS: In one of the wickedly funny moments of A Different Man, Edward is passed over by an agent specializing in casting actors with “unusual physiognomies” in favor of a crazed, but relatively normal looking, subway provocateur. Edward’s neurofibromitosis has disfigured his character even more than his face: he prefers to slink into the background, he’s understandably paranoid, and he’s jumpy from constantly being on alert to incoming social threats. And yet, he harbors a vanity: to be an actor, despite the fact that he can barely remember his lines and has no sense of the appropriate register for the one job he does land, playing a disabled employee in a corporate inclusivity training video. The only bright spot in his life is his crush on Ingrid, a cute aspiring playwright living in the next apartment, but even she instinctively recoils from his touch (while remaining unfailingly friendly). So miserable Edward can hardly be blamed for volunteering for an experimental therapy that might reduce his tumors: “the risk may be worth the reward.” And when the treatment works miraculously well, not merely reducing his blemishes but completely healing them and turning him into a handsome man, he can hardly be blamed for indulging in unselfconscious socializing and casual sex—although some of his post-cure decisions will prove questionable.

But when dashing Oswald, another man with neurofibromitosis who has all the talent and social capital Edwards craves, but without having cheated through surgery, bursts onto the scene, Edward (now called Guy) is chastened and again filled with self-doubt. A Different Man is not a literal doppelgänger film—-Oswald not quite a literal double, but an independent individual who simply happens to share a rare characteristic with Edward—-but he serves the same symbolic story function as William Wilson or James Simon. It is a fittingly twisted take on the trope of the double. The weirdest thing about the film is Oswald’s sudden omnipresence—he pops up at rehearsals, at the bar, in Ingrid’s apartment—as if he’s being summoned by Edward’s guilty conscience. And Oswald’s appearance ignites the film’s central irony: Ingrid writes an off-Broadway play with the role Edward was born to play, but because of his successful surgery, he’s no longer right for the part.

A Different Man posits what appears to be a simple moral: changing your surface appearance will not change your essential nature. And yet this simple fable plays out in anything but a simple fashion, because the characters of Edward/Guy and Ingrid are so complex. (Oswald is not complex: although Pearson’s performance is unimpeachable, he’s a one-note symbol here.) Edward does some bad things, but we are predisposed to forgive him because we know where he came from and how he suffered in the first act. Our empathy for him shifts with the plot twists. Ingrid, too, is not the angel she first seems, but just another flawed specimen of humanity. The screenplay pulls the viewer in so many different directions that, as you watch the film, the seemingly simple message plays as psychologically complex. While mostly a comedy, it begins by generating a deep empathy for Edward’s condition. When he goes through the painful experimental treatment and literally rips ribbons flesh off of his face, it briefly becomes a horror film. When Oswald mysteriously pops in, it toys with becoming a psychological thriller. As Edward’s jealousy grows, it angles towards satire. And all the while the film doesn’t shy away from self-reflection: discussing the play within the film, Ingrid wonders out loud whether it is wrong to cast someone because of their disfigurement, rather than in spite of it. Schimberg  keeps the viewer off balance, disguising the simplicity of the scenario in a way that seems to fully explore the story’s implications and yet leave something mysterious unsaid.

Writer/director Aaron Schimberg clearly created the movie as a showcase for Adam Pearson, who impressed him on the set of Chained for Life, and whom he described as “one of the biggest extroverts I’ve ever met: very much the life of the party, everybody loves him. He could be a cult leader if he wanted to.” Pearson obviously doesn’t get many feature film roles written for him, so the existence of two Schimberg/Pearson movies is a great bit of cinematic history trvia. If Schimberg comes up with a third unique role for Pearson, their collaboration may become legendary, in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood vein.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…far more surreal and weirder than you might be expecting, which should suggest just how strange this one gets. There’s a David Lynch vibe to things (alongside Woody Allen and especially Charlie Kaufman) that may affect audiences in different ways, but while at times it kept me at arm’s length, I never lost interest. Even when the plot goes a bit off the rails in the third act, I stayed engaged.”–Joey Magidson, Awards Radar (contemporaneous)