‘A Different Man’ Review: Sebastian Stan Drops the Mask in a Provocative Dark Comedy With a Heart – Hollywood Reporter

Seems will be deceiving in A Completely different Man, writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s endearingly twisted tackle actors, playwrights, egos and the plight of the profoundly disfigured.

Just like the well-known “Eye of the Beholder” episode of The Twilight Zone, during which people become society’s freakish outcasts, this darkish comedy suggests what occurs when an aspiring thespian bothered with neurofibromatosis manages to discover a miracle remedy, solely to lengthy for the life he had when he was nonetheless deformed.

The thesp in query — a nebbishy New York actor named Edward, or Ed — is performed with tongue-in-cheek gravitas by Sebastian Stan, who dons a number of layers of prosthetics (courtesy of ace make-up designer Mike Marino) till peeling them away to disclose his true face. However that hardly offers Ed the life he bargained for, in a movie that piquantly questions how others have a look at us and, extra importantly, how we have a look at ourselves.

Schimberg explored the same theme, albeit in a extra artsy trend, in his 2018 behind-the-scenes drama Chained for Life. That movie co-starred Adam Pearson, who many could keep in mind from his haunting sequence reverse Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer’s Below the Pores and skin, and who winds up stealing the present right here as a completely charming and nonchalant risk to Ed’s newfound existence.

The truth that Pearson is stricken with neurofibromatosis, and that Stan wore tons of make-up to imitate that situation, could increase just a few eyebrows. And but A Completely different Man could be very a lot about artwork imitating life and vice-versa, considering the completely different masks — whether or not actual or synthetic — we placed on when going out into the world.

At first, the story performs out like your typical NYC indie dramedy, with Ed dwelling in a grubby one-bedroom condominium in Brooklyn whereas attempting to make it as an actor. He has a nosy tremendous, a minimum of one neighbor who hates him, and there’s a leak in his ceiling that grows so large it dangers swallowing him up. The catch is that Ed’s disfigured state makes him fully stand out, a minimum of to the viewer. For individuals who already know him, he comes throughout as simply one other shy and curmudgeonly New Yawka.

Issues begin wanting up when a brand new neighbor, the radiant Ingrid (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Particular person within the World), strikes in subsequent door. Like Ed, she’s an aspiring artist — a playwright, the truth is — and the 2 quickly hit it off, even when Ed could be very a lot inhibited by his appears to be like. Ingrid is extra open-minded and curious, and one novel side of Schimberg’s script is how, not like in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, practically everybody Ed meets treats him with respect and compassion.

The movie’s first half is full of well-observed tidbits of dystopian New York humor, whether or not it’s unhinged individuals shedding it on the road, weary subway riders ignoring Ed on his experience again dwelling or, in a single amusingly tragic scene, a Mister Softee truck arriving simply as a neighbor’s corpse is wheeled out of the constructing. “He jogs my memory of Woody Allen,” somebody remarks about Ed, and if it weren’t for his face, he could be simply one other unhappy sack moping across the lonely metropolis.

The failing actor’s humdrum life takes a serious flip when he agrees to take part in an experimental drug program that might remedy his situation. After a number of scenes of Cronenberg-esque physique horror, he begins peeling away his tumors like a snake shedding its pores and skin, reworking right into a model new particular person with Stan’s well-defined face.

You’ll suppose this could all be for the higher, however as A Completely different Man goes on to disclose, issues really worsen. Ed quickly involves miss the person he as soon as was, particularly when Pearson’s character steps into the image and really casually hijacks his life, together with Ed’s burgeoning love affair with Ingrid.

That and different plot mechanics in Schimberg’s screenplay can appear a bit over-the-top, significantly when Ed begins to lose his thoughts within the third act as all the things unravels. Nonetheless, the story’s twists and turns preserve our curiosity all through, with the narrative taking over a cleverly deconstructed play-within-a-film format reminiscent, at instances, of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.

The antics are captured in grainy naturalistic visuals by Wyatt Garfield (The Kitchen) and backed by a rating from Umberto Smerilli that shifts between indie vibes and the basic melodies of Hollywood B-flicks. A Completely different Man shifts between a number of genres as properly, however Schimberg manages to tie issues neatly collectively by asking the identical query, in numerous methods, till the final scene: What’s in a face?

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