Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Different Man’ on Max, a Wild Head Trip Satire Starring an Inspired Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve

Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man (now streaming on Max) will get your head spinning. This ouroborosian and surreal mini-saga enjoyed a recent profile boost when star Sebastian Stan took home a Golden Globe for his role as a New Yorker whose neurofibromatosis manifests in facial deformity – and who undergoes a mysterious procedure to make him look like Sebastian Stan. See? Ouroborosian. It gets even better when Adam Pearson, the actor with real neurofibromatosis who we saw in Under the Skin, turns up looking exactly like Sebastian Stan did before his wildly convincing makeup job fell off in gooey Cronenbergian chunks. It’s even more complicated than I’m describing, because Renate Reinsve – you know, The Worst Person in the World – is also in the film, actively making it more complicated. Deliciously complicated, I might add.

A DIFFERENT MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Full disclosure: I initially thought Pearson was playing Edward and Stan would play the “new” Edward, but it turns out Stan was playing him all along, in one hell of a performance. I reveal this because you don’t need to stupidly stumble over that block like I did, which added a layer of confusion to my viewing experience. You’ll appreciate the film better knowing that, trust me. And so we first meet Edward (Stan!) acting on a film set, which we’ll soon find out is a kooky industrial PSA teaching viewers how to properly act around people with facial deformities. His acting career hasn’t progressed beyond this small role, not for lack of trying. He’s meek and lonely, and carries himself with the slumped shoulders of an insecure man.

Edward makes his way home through a slightly more hostile New York than is true – people keep weirdly bumping into him and invading his personal space – to his slightly dingy apartment. He has a new, very gross leak in the ceiling, and a new, not at all gross neighbor, Ingrid (Reinsve), who’s the kind of person who’s about 10 percent too nosy and asks blunt questions, but you put up with it because she’s gorgeous and confident and a little bit endearingly goofy. She’s a playwright from some fjord somewhere who asks if she can “get at” a blackhead on Edward’s nose, which is rather intimate, but when he holds her hand in a sweet and innocent way, she pulls it back. Is she shallow or gay or uninterested or judgmental or understanding or uncertain or empathetic or repulsed or repulsed that she’s repulsed or what? Don’t expect any answers to that. She’s the kind of woman who says “I leave a trail of tragedy in my wake” while making out, and her partner has no choice but to worry about that later. Kick the can. Reformulate the route. Be in the now, not the what-is-to-be. 

One day Edward’s doctor signs him up for an experimental treatment with a potential 100 percent cure for his deformities. The clinic he visits for treatment seems to have been designed and staffed by Charlie Kaufman – but they work some magic, and before you can blink, oh, let’s say, 218 times, his face falls apart in ooey-gooey gobs, and beneath it is Sebastian Stan’s face. After going to a bar and getting his D S’ed by a complete stranger (as one might believe happens to Sebastian Stan on the reg?), he returns home where he’s confronted by his super who doesn’t recognize him, and Edward compulsively says Edward is dead. Ingrid overhears. Fade out.

Fade in. Time has passed. Edward is now just a guy on the street who looks like Sebastian Stan. His name is now Guy. Guy is a successful real estate salesman with a crisp fit and a nice high-ceilinged apartment, as fits a guy like Guy. He spots Ingrid on the street and follows her to a pretty-far-off-Broadway theater, where she’s staging a play she wrote called Edward. Three guesses as to what it’s about. So Guy reads to play Edward, and gets the part, and gets the girl he didn’t get before. Ingrid is none the wiser to the reasons Guy is so good at playing Edward, who gets into character by donning a prosthetic mask that looks like his former face. And then Oswald (Pearson) shows up, looking almost exactly like Guy used to look back when he was Edward – and Oswald is outgoing and funny and confident. How infuriating! 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Oh man. Face/Off, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Under the Skin, Adaptation, Synecdoche New York, The Elephant Man, The Substance – all good movies to be reminded of.

Performance Worth Watching: The triumvirate of Stan, Pearson and Reinsve is terrifically potent – together, apart or in various combinations, their performances are insightful, ironic, offbeat and undeniably funny.

Memorable Dialogue: Guy and Ingrid are doing naked things in bed. Ingrid: “Do you have the mask? Put it on!”

Sex and Skin: Stan and Reinsve doing naked things in bed, featuring mutual toplessness and bottomlessness.

Our Take: I feel like I’ve divulged too much about this movie, but honestly, I haven’t. There are significant layers of theme and plot development here I haven’t touched. Dense movie. Anyway. I’m slightly disappointed Schimberg doesn’t take A Different Man further off the rails, but slightly more impressed that he doesn’t. That’s how twisted around this movie makes you feel. Other films about inner/outer beauty and identity and the masks we wear go batshit extreme – e.g., The Substance – so films like this can pull a few punches and go a little deeper, more subtle, more intricate. Schimberg does all that in a daffy manner that belies some of its complexities to the afterthink, which is a phrase I use to describe the process of watching a film and letting its insights emerge and blossom in your mind until you’re overwhelmed and just have to watch it again.

Schimberg’s style flavors the narrative – it has a grungy, dim ’70s look, with De Palma zoom-ins and cramped spaces. It’s another film among many in recent memory showing Lynch and Kaufman influence, although A Different Man isn’t quite at that level of controlled majesty or brain-waxing idiosyncracy. Schimberg focuses his thematic lens on ironies, stacking them high and wide scene after scene until we’re over our heads in the psychological weeds of the narrative, bewildered just like Edward/Guy/Whoever He’s Become. Yet every development of his character makes sense in its illogic, if that makes sense – of course he acts the way he does and he does what he does, because no one can handle the level of exquisite torture Schimberg puts him through. 

And how do we feel about all this? Conflicted. How deep are our sympathies for Edward compared to Guy? How much do we blame the character for his decisions? Do we blame him at all for those decisions? You’d be tempted to do the same, right? Schimberg nurtures a tone that bullseyes satire without sacrificing too much emotion, opening the door to some robust commentary on how we treat and consider people with disabilities, how the acting business treats and considers people with disabilities, and whether people with disabilities want to be recognized for their differences or treated like everyone else. Definitive answers to these ponderings are impossible, it seems, and A Different Man suggests that maybe the best thing to do is just muddle through it and hope for the best.

P.S. One more note on Reinsve. She is so funny in this I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it.

Our Call: A Different Man is a doozy of a head trip, and one of the funniest and most surprising films I’ve seen in a while. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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