A Different Man, a New York-set fable-cum-psycho-thriller from writer-director Aaron Schimberg, is the type of relentlessly bleak movie that conflates suffering with depth. Almost all of that suffering is borne by Edward (Sebastian Stan), a loner in a damp New York apartment building isolated by a genetic physical disfigurement (Stan wears prosthetics) who wants to be an actor. Life is a parade of indignities for Edward: people either stare too long or avert their eyes from his face. His ceiling leaks. The only acting gig he can find is in a PSA for offices on how to overcome disgust to treat co-workers with physical disfigurements like humans – “ask how they’re doing occasionally like you would anyone else”. His new neighbor Ingrid (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve) literally gasps upon seeing him for the first time.
It’s grim, though visually distinct and intriguing, at least initially. A Different Man seems to have something to say on disgust, one of the primal building blocks of human emotions, how it creeps and jolts and manifests. How we respond to, say, creeping mold on the ceiling, a drowned rat in brown water, a roach in coffee, a sliced finger oozing blood, gangrenous skin. Edward knows disgust well – he’s provoked it in people by just existing and internalized it into stuttering, near-wordless shame. His loneliness is so acute that he attaches deeply to the deeply self-involved Ingrid, an aspiring playwright who takes an interest in him out of boredom, vanity, ambition and curiosity.
At least the setup is interesting: unbeknownst to anyone, Edward enters a trial for a new miracle drug that alters his face, allowing him to start a new life as the conventionally attractive Guy (Stan, still handsome with a permanent scowl). Schimberg renders this development with a promising mix of odd, alienating sci-fi and as Edward’s face peels off, body horror. The tone is weird, clipped and Black Mirror-esque dystopia, effectively, if taxingly, setting up what could be a thorny examination of beauty and how much our outward appearance changes who we are.
Except A Different Man doesn’t deliver on that, instead settling for harsh provocation and unrelenting misery. Even in his glancingly portrayed new life as a marketable realtor who beds women in a light-filled loft, Edward is still painfully lonely, cut off from the world by his secret past. Life is still a slog of increasingly hard-to-take indignities, ignited once again by a chance encounter with Ingrid, now a successful enough playwright to stage an Off-Broadway production of her play about the disfigured man she once knew. The real Edward, posing as Guy, gets what he wants: a real acting part, playing his secret past self in a version of his relationship with Ingrid that flatters her; a relationship with Ingrid; a chance to connect his severed lives.
And yet it’s all constantly demeaning – Ingrid still self-obsessed and voyeuristic, the play callously exploitative, his isolation punishing. Worst of all, a self-destructive obsession with Oswald (Adam Pearson), an actor with a physical disfigurement who moves through the world with the vivaciousness, confidence and charm that Edward never had. Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis type I, is great as Oswald, witty and light, the movie’s would-be bright spot if the character wasn’t used to prove that all of Edward’s suffering was his own problem all along.
As fables of physical transformation go – characters toss around references to Beauty and the Beast like punches – this is a cruel one, constantly torturing its protagonist into a preposterous ending that lands the film back in the surreal. Stan tries to bring a wounded vulnerability to Edward, but there isn’t much to someone whose primary posture is emotional pain (and, again, a constant scowl). Reinsve, so luminous in The Worst Person in the World, struggles in her first English-language role; Ingrid is an admittedly terrible person, but the rhythm of her dialogue, while in line with the film’s general jarring tone, is extra off-putting.
Like Joker, another well-made but punishing film that torments its hero into evil, A Different Man is a slog, made worse by the fact that it seems to mistake darkness for insight. I will give points for Schimberg’s visual work at the outset, which effectively conjured a sense of discomfort or dread, as well as bursts of retro flourishes and occasional gestures of insight on society’s value on beauty. But that’s not enough to justify the endurance test.
A Different Man is showing at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year
