Cinema obsesses over doppelgängers and doubles. Perhaps that’s only natural since movie cameras let us record ourselves, and then play our images back in front of our own eyes. According to ancient folklore, seeing your doppelgänger was a harbinger of doom. So we get “Vertigo” and “Mulholland Drive” and “Possession” and “Us,” all haunted by some primal psychological dread.
“A Different Man,” written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, taps that apprehension with wryly absurd humor. Deft and clever, “A Different Man” is itself a doppelgänger of sorts for “The Substance,” the horror film starring Demi Moore, which opens on the same day. They both stick their fingers in a festering wound: our deep-down belief that if we could only shed our flaws, we’d unveil the cooler, more svelte, and above all happier selves that dwell within. They are films for our moment: It’s never been easier to alter our own appearances, and never been harder to escape our own faces.
But where “The Substance” is glossy and frantic, “A Different Man” lopes and zags and rubs some gratifying schmutz on the lens. There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.
The story begins with Edward (Sebastian Stan), an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition in which tumors grow beneath the skin. It has mainly affected his face, distorting his features. He has little confidence, and it doesn’t help that his latest gig is in a cheap and patronizing corporate training video aiding viewers in “accepting” and “including” co-workers with facial disfigurement.
Edward lives quietly in a small, old New York apartment populated by the usual New York characters: loudmouths and weirdos and people who pound on the ceiling when you walk too heavily. One day, though, the gorgeous and friendly Ingrid (Renata Reinsve) moves in next door. She is an aspiring playwright, and she and Edward strike up a friendship.
“A Different Man” starts out realistically enough, but it’s loaded with all kinds of strange particularities that keep warping into new shapes. There’s a dark leak on Edward’s ceiling, for instance, that spreads menacingly. It’s the sort of detail you’re not sure if you’re supposed to keep an eye on. That’s also true of Edward’s red typewriter, on which Ingrid notices he’s typed out a single sad sentence about the cruel way people react to his face.
The thing is, Edward’s perception of others’ reactions is only sort of correct, more a product of his internalized disgust than reality. A few characters do startle when they first see him. Some stare briefly. But for the most part, those who encounter him don’t react to his face at all — certainly not the way he’s described on his typewriter. This is New York, full of every kind of person. He’s just another guy with a different-looking face.
Until that face peels off, revealing the comely cheekbones of Sebastian Stan, and things get weird. “A Different Man,” as its name implies, is less about appearances than insides, or perhaps about how the two interact. When an experimental medical procedure changes Edward’s life beyond his wildest dreams, it’s as if he’s landed in a fairy tale. (“Beauty and the Beast” is mentioned more than once.) Yet — surprise — his personality hasn’t morphed with his features. It’s almost as if his appearance was never the issue.
That fact becomes blindingly clear when he meets Oswald, a man about town whom everyone seems to instantly love. Oswald is played by the actor Adam Pearson, who unlike Stan actually does have neurofibromatosis. His performance is buoyantly charismatic, and we swiftly understand alongside Edward that this guy knows how to live his life.
Things become much stranger and funnier from there. Schimberg’s screenplay constantly leads the audience — and Edward — down paths that seem as though they ought to be absurd, only to have them kind of make sense. There are echoes of Kaufman’s film “Adaptation,” in which the lives of two men who are sort of distinct and sort of not intertwine; you begin to wonder who, exactly, is writing this movie. Eventually it’s better to stop trying to parse the narrative logic and submit to the bigger feeling.
It is not completely clear which decade “A Different Man” is set in (another characteristic it shares with “The Substance,” incidentally). It looks grainy and a little dirty, and the cinematographer Wyatt Garfield often employs slow zooms and wide shots to evoke the 1970s. Ingrid’s apartment in particular is full of furnishings and fixtures in colors and fabrics from that era, too. But the medical technology that changes Edward’s life is almost futuristic, which can lead to only one conclusion: This is more of a fable than a realistic tale of a man who has a strange life.
And that, of course, is the point. Like many literary and cinematic fables before it — think of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” or “The Elephant Man” — “A Different Man” is really a morality play, of a kind. It’s just that the moral isn’t all that straightforward. It’s about a societal obsession with particular standards of beauty. The fact that conventionally attractive people, or people with certain features and skin colors, tend to encounter more success in life simply by dint of genetic luck is explicit throughout. But that fact is so obvious, and stated so blatantly outright, that it feels like a joke.
Edward’s post-transformation turmoil, too, seems like a parable of some kind. See, becoming as handsome as a literal movie star won’t make you happy. But even that feels a bit too neat, too obvious. “A Different Man” is more peculiar than these axiomatic truths. It is a folk tale about a man who encountered his double and discovered the old fears were true. Perhaps the scariest thing in the world is running into someone who’s just like you, but better at it — someone who’s figured out how to live your life and love it, who’s never accepted the idea that he’s less than others. And all the self-improvement strategies in the world won’t help to make you a different man.
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