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We all worth, or declare to worth, concepts. We need them in our motion pictures, our books, our music; in any other case, the considering goes, we’re simply ingesting empty energy. But not all concepts are created equal. Sometimes they’re floating too freely throughout the materials to be tethered to any significant interpretation; different occasions they’re so ploddingly instructive that we really feel pummeled. The concepts embedded in A Different Man, written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, hover someplace within the milky center between being too amorphous and too apparent, although by the tip, you’ll most definitely have gotten the purpose. Yet it is a film through which the performers make all of the distinction—the actors embody the concepts so wholly that the messages layered into the script are simply superfluous embroidery. It’s value seeing A Different Man for the 2 performances at its coronary heart, given by Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.
Stan, at first carrying prosthetic make-up, performs Edward, a struggling actor whose employment consists solely of the occasional workplace-training video. Edward has a uncommon genetic situation referred to as Neurofibromatosis, which causes tumors to develop on the pores and skin and in different components of the physique. It impacts his facial look and his speech, and marks him as “totally different.” We see one of many clumsy movies through which he’s featured, apparently enacting some sort of by-the-water-cooler fainting spell; his co-workers within the video ostensibly deal with him as a person by condescending to him—precisely the type of habits these movies must be working in opposition to. But within the film, this video handily makes an necessary level: that is the type of habits Edward has to discipline each day. No surprise he appears to be shuffling by means of life, deferential to others nearly to the purpose of obliterating himself. If he could make himself invisible, he received’t must endure the cruelty of different people, each those that imply hurt and people who imply nicely.
Edward, who lives in a dismal residence someplace in New York (each this flat and this New York considerably resemble Ari Aster’s imaginative and prescient in Beau Is Afraid), has a brand new and really engaging neighbor, Renate Reinsve’s Ingrid. She startles visibly when she first sees him; then she affords friendship, and presumably one thing extra. She’s an aspiring playwright, and Edward talks to her, glumly, about his almost nonexistent appearing profession. Her magnificence and her brightness appear to make him really feel extra morose than standard. He’s used to dwelling his life compared to others, and it brings him nothing however struggling.
Then he’s supplied an opportunity to attempt an experimental facial reconstruction remedy. It works! His previous face step by step peels away—the method resembles the stretching of melted mozzarella, or possibly a time-lapse rendering of certainly one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes—revealing a really good-looking younger man beneath. Now Edward can lastly learn the way the remainder of the world lives. He turns into a high-flying actual property honcho, in addition to, after all, successful with the women. Then Ingrid comes again into his life, in a roundabout means—she after all doesn’t acknowledge him. And he meets one other particular person who considerably resembles the person he was, however solely bodily. Oswald (Adam Pearson) is a jaunty Brit who favors pocket squares and shiny, patterned shirts. He’s a charmer—everybody loves him, particularly girls. In him, Edward sees the person he, along with his previous face, might need been. Oswald represents each a rebuke and a missed alternative.
And when he seems, the movie abruptly levitates. Schimberg has labored with Pearson earlier than, in his 2019 movie Chained for Life. (Moviegoers may also know the actor from his look in Jonathan Glazer’s haunting parable of loneliness Under the Skin.) Schimberg was so impressed by Pearson’s confidence and appeal that he wrote the a part of Oswald particularly for him, and the second he exhibits up, a light-weight activates: Edward, in his previous persona, has invited our pity, and possibly gotten it. Oswald brushes proper previous the thought of pity—we’re so drawn to him that we are able to’t even think about feeling it.
That proper there’s a lot for a film, and for 2 actors, to hold. Stan is terrific because the eternally surly Edward: his good-looking pout, post-transformation, isn’t one thing that provides us pleasure. If something, it makes us want we might have the previous Edward again, who a minimum of had some shambling appeal. And Pearson is off the charts as Oswald: he swaggers by means of the film like its dazzling, unofficial mayor, assembly and greeting and inspiring openness, moderately than closure, on the planet round him. The dynamic between Oswald and Edward is wealthy territory by itself. The drawback is that Schimberg retains including layers of plot to drive his factors house, as an alternative of simply stepping again to let his characters do their factor. The film sends us house with a message—let’s say it’s one thing alongside the strains of “Think onerous about the way you view others who’re totally different”—even because the actors open out one other mind-set: Since we’re all people anyway, why see variations as variations in any respect? That’s an concept that goes past our idea of what an “thought” even is. It’s a fundamental tenet of dwelling—or a minimum of it must be.
