Of all the careers boosted by the MCU, not many have taken as fantastically odd a trajectory as Sebastian Stan’s. The freedom granted by breaking out big as Bucky/Winter Soldier and all the big Disney-backed paydays that entails has allowed to pursue his true passion – playing skeevy weirdos in everything from I, Tonya to Fresh to Pam and Tommy. In 2024, he’s pushing that envelope to its most extreme by playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice, but first he has to take on a different ill-informed New Yorker driven insane by his own vanity while also working in real estate in the form of Edward in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, a role that provides Stan with the best leading performance of his career.
Edward is a man living with neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow beneath the skin and cause prominent facial disfigurements. Trying to get work as an actor, Edward is only really cast in workplace sensitivity training videos, and the ill-treatment he receives in public follows him home, where he is meek and uninteresting even to himself, while his cruddy damp apartment essentially falls apart around him. Depressed and listless, he volunteers for an experimental drug trial to ‘cure’ himself, a trial that works, removing his facial tumours until he has the familiar, sinisterly handsome face of Stan.
This process is a gruelling one, and it’s just as uncomfortable to watch for an audience as it is for Edward to live through, Schimberg embracing grisly body horror (actually quite reminiscent of the recent The Substance) as flesh starts sloughing off Edward’s face. It’s watch-behind-your-fingers grotesque, while Schimberg also dials up the sonic hostility of the New York streets and Edward’s apartment whilst he’s under the drug’s influence, creating a profoundly, even viscerally, disturbing atmosphere.
It’s a really intense opening, but necessary to put us in Edward’s headspace as the film enters a more psychologically upsetting vein once he becomes the ‘different man’ of the title. With his new, completely unrecognisable good looks, Edward abandons his old identity, taking on the name Guy, joining a real estate firm, and telling everyone who knew Edward that he committed suicide. He soon finds himself being driven slowly mad, though, when he decides to star in a play written by his former neighbour, the empathetic but blunt Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), about Edward, who she ‘knows’ to be dead.
As ‘Guy’ takes on the role of the man he truly is, his sense of reality and self collapses, only worsened by the appearance of charismatic Brit Oswald (Adam Pearson, best known as one of Scarlett Johansson’s victims in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin). Oswald also has neurofibromatosis, but has not been rendered shy and retiring by it – he’s an explosion of charm and confidence, and Edward is consumed by an ever growing jealousy of this man who represents a past he thought he had wanted to escape. It makes for a complex set of extreme negative emotions that Stan plays fantastically well.
He’s scary, pitiful, frustrating, and also very darkly funny (a great running gag is that Edward doesn’t really seem to know anything about anything). Both before and after the drug, Edward is a man tortured by wishing to be someone else, and Stan conveys that bone deep pain with a sort of empty smile that is genuinely quite chilling, grounding the drama in this bleak emotional reality even as events take a turn for the ever more surreal and Edward’s actions grow more manic. Schimberg, DOP Wyatt Garfield, and composer Umberto Smerilli all create a version of New York that feels at once familiar and bizarre, a place that you believe could house these strange events.
Schimberg also manages to fit in some serious points about representation in art and how complex a question it is when it comes to portraying disability, but if you think you’re walking in to a worthy ‘issues movie’ with A Different Man, you will come out shocked. This is a gnarly, often venomous piece of existential horror about a man in a precipitous mental and spiritual decline, anchored by yet another wonderfully nasty performance from Sebastian Stan that raises plenty of questions without ever giving a clean answer.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 