Writer-director Aaron Schimberg has created a diverting, if contrived, noir satire-parable about the faces we prepare to meet the faces that we meet. I’m not sure that, finally, it says as much as it thinks it’s saying, and I’m also not sure if the resemblance to early Woody Allen is intentional or not. But it is arresting and challenging with an exhilarating performance from Adam Pearson, from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and whom Schimberg has in fact already directed in his previous feature Chained For Life.
The setting is a dark and dingy New York City, where Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a would-be actor with a craniofacial condition who so far has only got work in an instructional video for corporations about how to treat co-workers with craniofacial conditions. Poor Edward is shy and nervous (his neighbour says he’s like Woody Allen) and Reinate Reinsve has the Annie Hall role as Ingrid, the quirky-beautiful next-door neighbour who is kind to him.
