Writer-director Aaron Schimberg peels again the bandages on a frail, anxious New Yorker’s experimental facial transformation within the unusual, humorous, and beautifully acted “A Different Man,” starring Sebastian Stan. A fantasy nightmare paying homage to Rod Serling at his most brash and biting, it additionally traffics in cinematic cues from quite a lot of many years focusing on unsettling leisure: ’30s and ’40s horror noir, ’70s neurotic comedy, and ’80s no-frills indie about city life.
In its off-axis sensibility, “A Different Man” matches Schimberg’s persistent curiosity concerning the fragility of id. If you noticed his nimble, good 2019 “Chained for Life,” concerning the vanities that plague the making of a low-budget film a few mad scientist with an all-disabled forged, you understand how attuned Schimberg might be to on a regular basis slights and microaggressions. And as a scholar of all types of movie, Schimberg makes certain so as to add an additional layer: the way in which tradition performs an enormous function in how we understand others and work together with the world.
When we meet Edward (Stan), a reserved man with extreme facial deformities, his outlook on life is quite resigned: the world sees him as an oddity and he behaves like somebody relegated to the background of life. Although he works as an actor (he has an element in a coaching video that teaches staff learn how to cope with “facially totally different” co-workers (it is as humorous and awkward because it sounds) it is not even clear that Edward considers himself an artist. His job may as properly be Lonely Guy in a Dark Apartment, with a stained, leaky, quickly increasing gap within the ceiling over an annoying co-worker.
Suddenly, nevertheless, he receives some encouraging, even flirtatious consideration from the engaging, sharp new neighbor Ingrid (“The Worst Person within the World” breakout Renate Reinsve), a self-proclaimed playwright who hasn’t written something but. What Edward is privately pursuing is a revolutionary medical process that will reconfigure his face and flip the script of his life. In Schimberg’s world, everyone seems to be so culture-conscious that even Edward’s physician says, “You could be in a documentary sometime.”
One painful evening, Edward discovers how properly the treatment works when his face begins to peel off in gooey, bloody blobs, revealing somebody within the mirror who appears to be like like, properly, Sebastian Stan. Just as shortly, Edward leaps on the alternative for revision, calling himself “Guy” the subsequent day to his constructing’s caretaker, who does not acknowledge him, and cheerfully informing him that Edward is lifeless.
Adam Pearson, left, and Sebastian Stan within the movie “A Different Man.”
(Matt Infante / A24)
Schimberg wastes no time with this pivot, skipping forward to the place Guy is now a profitable actual property agent with a luxurious condominium, an workplace romance, and his “man sweet” beauty trumpeted everywhere in the firm’s slick adverts. But at some point, he notices his previous neighbor Ingrid on the road and may’t assist herself. Following her to a small theater, he discovers she’s auditioning for her first play, a few soulful, unhappy, disfigured man named Edward. The self he left behind is now, as imagined by the lady who left, the function of a lifetime. But additionally a harmful portal.
Channeling John Frankenheimer’s 1966 psychodrama “Seconds” by “Beauty and the Beast,” Schimberg has delightfully stranger and extra self-destructive plans for his reworked protagonist: a doomed cycle of character disintegration because the previous catches up with him. Edward was genuine, one thing he deserted to grow to be the generic “Guy,” able to being appreciated solely when he wore the masks of his former self.
Leave it to the creative course of and a 3rd collaborator, Guy’s substitute Oswald (the great Adam Pearson of “Under the Skin,” who suffers from neurofibromatosis), to delve deeper into these problems with the cracked mirror. Ingrid’s stressed seek for moral fact (to not point out good critiques and a packed home) leads her to show more and more to the knowledge and pleasant attraction of Oswald, who shares Edward’s facial options however whose charming confidence and wealthy, fulfilling life could not be farther from the brooding man of the movie’s first half. Or, for that matter, the jealous, cowardly Guy who emerges to the floor, whom Stan hilariously nails with each seething grimace.
Adam Pearson within the film “A Different Man”.
(Matt Infante / A24)
The Kafkaesque reversal-of-fortune humor that follows, centered on how the mere presence of the beloved, gregarious Oswald turns Guy/Edward’s id disaster on its head, is as cleverly conceived a comic book nightmare as we’ve had because the heyday of Woody Allen or “Zelig”-era Charlie Kaufman (whose movie “Synecdoche, New York” looks like a cousin). Adding to the movie’s retro really feel are Wyatt Garfield’s grainy 16mm cinematography and Umberto Smerilli’s startling, funereal rating, each of which do a lot to determine a cutthroat, get-lost metropolis that at instances jogged my memory of Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant.”
But there may be additionally one thing lovely to be preserved on this “watch out what you want for” situation, and that’s the way forward for actor Pearson, whom Schimberg first forged memorably in “Chained for Life,” and whose enduring charisma brings the screenplay’s considerations to life. Pearson has been given an ideal function right here, to make sure, and within the wake of “A Different Man,” which often is the final phrase in incapacity satire, hopefully he turns into well-known sufficient to forge a profession primarily based on nothing lower than his confirmed vary. Which can be a welcome change, certainly.
