Tag Archives: Freak

A DIFFERENT MAN (2024)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve,

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.

Still from A Different Man (2024)

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/ 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)

CAPSULE: CHAINED FOR LIFE (2018)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Stephen Plunkett,  Charlie Korsmo

PLOT: While starring in a low budget period horror film, Mabel makes the acquaintance of some affable “freaks” brought on set for authenticity; while the main cast and crew’s away, the freaks pass the time making their own movie vignettes.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Made as a rejoinder to the infamous Freaks (1932), Aaron Schimberg’s movie is non-exploitative, clever, funny, and professional. While the meta-narrative gets a little odd at one point, Chained to Life really boils down to being a feel-good comedy in the very best possible way.

COMMENTS: I found something very odd about my viewing experience of Chained for Life, and it wasn’t the subject matter. After the brief introduction by the soft-spoken director, I was feeling nervous, for some reason. Admittedly, I’ve had difficulty coping with the sight of deformity (in person and otherwise), but having thought about it—and having now seen the movie—it was the wider critical interpretation that I’d read beforehand that made me apprehensive, and afterwards made me confused. I’ll talk about what other critics saw later; me, I saw a charming, character-driven comedy.

When a busload of disabled people show up at the shoot for a period horror film, there is a hiccup of apprehension on the part of the “normals” already present. The leading lady, Mabel (Jess Weixler), plays the movie’s movie’s leading lady, a woman blinded by some unexplained accident who is promised to be cured through radical surgery. However, Chained for Life focuses primarily on the actors and crew involved, in particular on the blossoming friendship between the physically self-conscious Mabel and the physically self-accepting Rosenthal (Adam Pearson). While primary filming progresses by day, the “freaks” lodge in the hospital by night, eventually deciding to play around with filmmaking themselves. One twist leads to a cute reveal after a ways, but the story is pretty simple.

That’s not to say it isn’t well done. By using the pretentious “art-house” nonsense being filmed by a hyper- stand-in (billed only as “Herr Director”) as a counterpoint to the day-to-day scenes of people interacting with people, Aaron Schimberg crumples up any fear of “the Other” by focusing on the lighter side of the banality everyone faces. There are also moments of considerable hilarity scattered throughout. At one point, Herr Director demands Rosenthal “emerge from the shadows”. When asked the simple question, “What am I doing in the shadows?,” Herr Director goes off on a lengthy, increasingly impassioned tangent concerning The Muppet Movie, the Muppets’ epic quest, and the big reveal of . This handily reveals the director’s obsessions without providing Rosenthal with any good reason why his character would just be kicking around in the dark, while also nicely linking the two phenomena together: as Schimberg remarked in an interview, whenever there’s a big reveal (chair swivel, shadow emergence), it’s either a celebrity or a “freak”.

But what of those other critics? One used the term “black comedy” , and the only interpretation I can make of that being any comedy involving these kinds of people must be subversive somehow. Another’s mind was blown by a modest twist found in the final act; it was as if he watched a far more complicated movie than I had. But despite the unsettling undercurrents discovered by other reviews, I found Chained for Life to be as pleasing as it is witty. As the credits appear, they spool over one long take on the bus of the variously disabled actors after the in-movie movie shoot. After so deftly undermining preconceptions about disfigured people, this stunt pays off handsomely. What do we see when we watch them on the bus? Totally normal people being totally, normal, bored. It was an excellent flourish and a perfect way to underline the film’s thesis.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It all culminates in an odd, almost surreal sequence in the back of a hired car, shot in a single long take. This deeply weird finale, both humorous and moving, strikes an uncanny note I’m not sure I’ve quite seen before — something mesmerizingly close to the sensation of a waking dream.”–Callum Marsh, The Village Voice (festival screening)

338. FREAKS (1932)

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“BELIEVE IT OR NOT – – – – STRANGE AS IT SEEMS. In ancient times, anything that deviated from the normal was considered an omen of ill luck or representative of evil.”–prologue to Freaks

Freaks is one of the strangest movies ever made by an American studio.”–David Skal

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Leila Hyams, Henry Victor, Daisy Earles

PLOT: At a circus, an evil performer intends to marry a sideshow midget to exploit him for his wealth. Eventually her plans extend to attempted murder. The midget’s fellow sideshow denizens have his back, exacting a primitive form of carnival justice.

BACKGROUND:

  • Freaks was based on Tod Robbins’ short story “Spurs.”
  •  Director Tod Browning started out as a contortionist performing in the circus himself, an inspiration from which he drew for this movie.
  • Browning leveraged his clout from helming the previous year’s hit Dracula to get Freaks made. The controversial film nearly ended his career, however; he would direct only four more projects (working uncredited on two of them) before retiring in 1939.
  • MGM stars Myrna Loy, Victor McLaglen, and Jean Harlow all turned down parts in the film due to the subject matter.
  • Freaks was often banned by state censors in its original form when it first came out. It was not allowed to be exhibited in the United Kingdom until the late 1963. It’s since been cut from a reported 90-minute running time, leaving us with the modern edit that runs just over an hour. The original full length may forever be lost. The cut version was a dud at the box office.
  • Although Freaks bombed on its original release and was pulled from theaters, it survived when (Maniac) bought the rights and took the film on tour (often using alternate titles like Forbidden Love and Nature’s Mistakes) in the late 1940s. Freaks was screened at Cannes in 1962 and received positive reappraisals, sparking its second life as a cult film.
  • “Entertainment Weekly” ranked Freaks third in their 2003 list of the Top 50  Cult Movies.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Sing it along with us, Internet: “We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us! Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble!” The Wedding Feast (it gets its own title card) is an omnipresent meme for very good reasons. Fast forward to it if you must, because this is the true beginning of Freaks.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Sensually connected twins; “Gooble-gobble!”; half-boy with Luger

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Life is not always fair; sometimes you’re born with no legs. But sometimes your movie comes along at the precise pinpoint in history where it could get made. We will always have exactly one Freaks, because even substituting CGI for actually disabled people, nobody in a modern day Hollywood studio would have the balls to remake this.


The opening scenes of Freaks

COMMENTS: We all know examples of movies where their hype far Continue reading 338. FREAKS (1932)

290. SKINS (2017)

Pieles

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“I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.”–Baruch Spinoza

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ana Polvorosa, Candela Peña, , Carmen Machi, Jon Kortajarena, Secun de la Rosa, Itziar Castro, Antonio Durán ‘Morris’, Ana María Ayala,

PLOT: Unable to control his impulses, a tormented pedophile visits a madam who specializes in “unusual” tastes. From the catalog she offers, he selects a girl born with no eyes, and brings her a gift of two jewels. The lives of these two, along with other internally and externally deformed people including a woman with an anus for a mouth and a boy who wishes he was a mermaid, intersect in surprising ways seventeen years later.

Still from Skins [Pieles] (2017)

BACKGROUND:

  • Eduardo Casanova was a child star on Spanish television. Starting in 2009, he used the money and connections he made acting to make a series of short films. Many of the eventual cast members of Skins appear in these shorts. One, 2015’s “Eat My Shit,” features Ana Polvorosa in an incident that later made it into Skins (although the tone of the short is more juvenile and jokey than the feature film).
  • Underground director and actress (who starred in one of Casanova’s earlier shorts and appears in a small role as a psychiatrist here) served as producers.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This pink and purple freak fantasia provides many possibilities, both disturbing and beautiful. The obvious choice would be Samantha, the girl with the inverted digestive system. If at all possible, it’s best that her appearance be left as a surprise, although that may be hard to do given her prominence in the trailer and the fact that she’s the character everyone describes when describing the movie to their friends. We’ll go in a different, but equally memorable, direction by selecting Cristian’s mermaid-boy fantasy, which features the lavender-headed outcast seated on a rock crusted by pink seashells in a purple-walled heaven while fish rain around him.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Pink merkin; the prettiest eyes in the world; freak fetish

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  From the opening scene of a reluctant pedophile crying as he makes his selection in a highly specialized brothel, decorated all in pink and run by an elderly madame who works in the nude, Skins‘s crazy credentials are never in doubt. Perhaps the most shocking things aren’t the deformities and perversions but the compassion and intricate plotting, which suggest depths beyond Skins‘ freak show surface.


Promotional video for Skins (Imagine Film Festival Screening)

COMMENTS: A weird, glittering pink gem lies hidden deep in the Continue reading 290. SKINS (2017)