‘A Different Man’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Aaron Schimberg. US. 2023. 111mins

A gutsy satire that eviscerates ’beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ platitudes while sensitively exploring the stigma around facial disfigurement, A Different Man is a moody modern fairy tale in which an aspiring actor who blames his lack of success on his looks unexpectedly gets a new appearance — only to discover that his problems are more than skin deep.

A blistering portrait of identity, authenticity and chronic dissatisfaction

Writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s third feature boasts three remarkable performances, including Sebastian Stan as the self-loathing thespian and Adam Pearson, a British actor with neurofibromatosis. Pearson’s very presence challenges the film to avoid exploitation and, instead, offer a blistering portrait of identity, authenticity (both in the arts and in life), and chronic dissatisfaction.

A24 will release A Different Man in the US later this year, following a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Arthouse crowds should easily warm to this funny, thought-provoking existential comedy that might draw comparisons to Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending, melancholy work. Stan’s stardom could help grosses, and he is also joined by The Worst Person In The World’s Renate Reinsve as well as Pearson, who is well known in the UK for his campaigning work.

Lonely, depressed Edward (Stan) has neurofibromatosis, struggling to land acting jobs in New York as a result. (The only gig he has been able to book lately is a workplace instructional video meant to educate employees not to be repulsed by those who are ’facially different’.) His new neighbour is the beautiful Ingrid (Reinsve), a budding playwright whose warm feelings for him appear to be only platonic. Despondent that she will never love him, Edward volunteers for an experimental drug program that could ‘cure’ his condition, and in short order, his tumours are gone — leaving him looking like the hunky Sebastian Stan. Now calling himself Guy, and informing acquaintances that Edward committed suicide, he happily plots his new existence.

Schimberg, whose 2019 comedy Chained For Life also starred Pearson, has delivered a nervy premise that avoids predictably patronising pleas for tolerance. Instead, the writer-director sharply critiques an insecure, self-pitying actor who comes to understand that changing his face really does not change anything at all.

Edward initially enjoys life as Guy — the random hookups, a killer job as a slick real-estate agent — but when he later sees Ingrid on the streets, he follows her and discovers that she has written a heartbreaking play about him, called Edward, that borrows heavily from their friendship. A Different Man’s twists should not be spoiled, but let it be said that Edward decides to audition for the title role — after all, who knows Edward better than he? — and courts Ingrid, who does not recognise him, only for their romance to be interrupted by Oswald (Pearson), a charming stranger who has neurofibromatosis and visits the theatre during rehearsals, excited to see a play that treats his condition with tactfulness.

A Different Man puts us into Edward’s head, the camera often capturing him as he looks longingly at all the seemingly blissful people around him who are free of the medical condition that he feels is his burden. But despite Oscar-nominee Mike Marino’s superb makeup work, it is telling that, once we see Pearson, we recognise how even the expert prosthetics fail to convey what neurofibromatosis looks like; just one way in which Schimberg questions his and other artists’ attempt to tell stories about disfigurement. Are they inherently exploitative? Insultingly patronising? Can someone without the condition ever fully appreciate what it is like to have neurofibromatosis? Rather than being coyly meta about these questions, A Different Man dissects them with intelligence and humour.

Reinsve shines as a kind soul whose relationship with Edward/Guy evolves in unexpected ways, but it is the interplay between Stan and Pearson that elevates A Different Man to another, more poignant and biting level. Stan portrays Edward as withdrawn and despondent, cannily playing into the audience’s pitying assumptions about a disfigured character. But when Pearson arrives, he explodes them, depicting Oswald as a confident, funny man, which shocks Edward (now going as Guy), who learns too late that his insecurity held him back — not his neurofibromatosis. Stan’s performance as Guy is full of nuanced anguish, the response of a man who thought being handsome was all he needed.

In the later reels, Schimberg sends the film down a dark, bitterly ironic path, consistently confronting our preconceived notions about attraction, beauty and the need to be truly seen. Some people will always want what they do not have, but it is hard to imagine anyone feeling short-changed by such a tonally rich, thematically ambitious film.