A Different Man

An aspiring actor undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. However, his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare as he becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.

Edward Lemuel is a socially awkward and struggling actor with a genetic disease known as neurofibromatosis, which can cause tumors to grow on various parts of the body.

For Edward, these tumors primarily affect his face and head.

Edward lives a lonely and quiet life, but when his new neighbor, an inspiring playwrite named Ingrid Vold moves in, they become friends, and end up spending a lot of time together. Edward has always been solitary, he is used to being rejected because of his condition. Ingrid, on the other hand, is effusive, very forward, and very physical with her interactions and affections, something Edward isn't used to at all. He quickly falls in love, and then just as quickly, he discovers that a friendship is all that will ever exist between them.

Tired of the rejection, exhausted with having opportunities within his grasp, only to lose them as people recoil in horror, and determined to change his life once and for all, Edward secretly signs up to be a test subject in an experimental medical procedure. This procedure has the potential to not only to shrink his tumors, but possibly even cure him completely.

When the procedure works, and Edward sees his new face staring back at him, he seizes his chance at freedom, at having a new life. Telling everyone that Edward has killed himself, he assumes the identity of Guy Moratz, and heads out into the world as a new man, a different man.

Time passes, and Edward/Guy has become a wealthy and successful real estate agent, admired by his colleagues, and desired by woman.

And yet, he is unfulfilled.

By pure chance, Edward/Guy sees that Ingrid is producing an off-Broadway play titled Edward, and as he watches, it's obvious that she has based the play off of her experience with him, a man she believes to have killed himself in his sorrow. The play is still casting, and Edward/Guy sees his chance. The fire of his old love of acting relit within him, he uses a cast of his face, that was made at the start of the medical procedure, and wears it as a mask to the audition. He ends up getting the lead role as Edward, as something in his performance speaks to Ingrid. Being the lead in a play is something Edward/Guy has always dreamed off. Even better, he and Ingrid are soon in the sexual relationship.

It's everything he always wanted.

But the whole time, he knows they're both lying to each other. Edward/Guy is lying to Ingrid about his true identity, and Ingrid is lying to Edward/Guy about the play, what inspired her, and how she created it. His insecurities eat at him.

Then, during one rehearsal, a man who also has neurofibromatosis stops in. His name is Oswald, and he is everything that Edward/Guy never was and wanted to be before the procedure. Oswald is confident and personable, he's charismatic, he's funny, he's interesting, he listens and engages, and soon enough, drawn in by the play's subject, he has befriended the cast and crew. Edward/Guy watches Oswald with a barely-contained envy as Oswald moves happily and easily through their world, seemingly without care or concern, and all despite his condition, something that Edward/Guy was never able to do.

One night, Ingrid asks Edward/Guy to wear his Edward mask during sex. He obliges, but she laughs almost immediately and calls it "fucked up." The shame and self-loathing are almost too much for Edward/Guy to bear.

As Edward/Guy grows more bitter, Ingrid and Oswald grow much closer. Soon, she is making rewrites to the play's script, the story of Edward/Guy's life, based on Oswald's feedback. Then, she decides that Oswald should have the lead role of Edward, in the name of authenticity. Edward/Guy is suddenly no longer (secretly) playing himself, and has been relegated to a minor after-thought of a pity-part that Ingrid tacked on to the end of the play. Even worse, soon after, Oswald replaces Edward/Guy in Ingrid's bed too.

All of his happiness has turned to ash.

And on top of all of that, the play is a success, and Oswald's performance receives rave reviews. It's just one more thing that Oswald has that Edward/Guy was never able to achieve.

Edward/Guy starts stalking Oswald, his mental state deteriorating. He is fired from his real estate job for his erratic behavior. He eventually storms the stage one night to physically attack Oswald, but he is injured during the scuffle, as part of the set falls on him, breaking his legs and arms. Then, while he is stuck in a body cast and recovering from his injuries, Edward/Guy must endure a life under the care of Ingrid and Oswald, who are now deep into the process of adapting the play into a film with Michael Shannon in the lead. He seethes.

Finally, after Edward/Guy's physical therapist expresses disgust for Oswald's face, Edward/Guy stabs him to death.

Years later, a much older Edward/Guy, fresh from prison, once again encounters Oswald on the street. He agrees to meet Oswald and Ingrid for dinner. The pair have been happily married for a long time, and have lived a highly successful life, and now they are both abuzz with their impending move to Canda, where they will join a nudist cult. They both look back on the Edward play with disdain now, and tell Edward/Guy that the film fell through, but that it was for the best. After that, a waiter arrives to take their orders, and after seeing them so casually dismiss his dream, Edward struggles to choose from the menu.

Oswald jokes that Edward has not changed a bit.

A Different Man is a fable, and a morality play.

It's a bit of a modern folk tale too, a twist on those old fears of the Changeling, telling a story of a man who meets his "other" and discovers that his other is better at being him than he is.

An interesting opposite side of the coin from the movie The Substance, A Different Man is a self-referential, self-examining film, and it often interrogates itself and its motivations throughout the story. It is at times surreal and unsettling and bold in its approach, but suffers from a more and more tenuous grasp on its narrative as it goes on. It also touches very obviously on themes about society's obsession with beauty, and how it favors more conventionally attractive people, and how people with certain features or skin colors are generally given much more opportunities in life, but for all it's heavy themes, for all it's soul-searching, for all it's surreal comedy and dramatic flourishes, in the end, A Different Man has a pretty simple message...

It's what's inside that counts.

It's about how all the self-improvement and focus on the exterior in the world will not make you a different person, a better person, if the soul remains unchanged. Basically... turning into a handsome movie star won't solve your problems.

And all the while, this also exists as a strange and maybe unintended meta commentary, as the main problem with this film is that, despite this message being as clearly stated as it is, in the end, it feels too neat, too obvious, to just be that. It feels like there has to be more going on here, and this is due to the partcular way the story is told, the exterior flourishes, if you will. Like the dark stain on Edward’s apartment ceiling caused by a leak, its steady malignant spread seeming to imply a greater meaning, or maybe Edward’s typewriter, a pretty little anachronism that serves no purpose to the characters other than decoration, but which continues to appear throughout the film, as a metaphor that gets murkier each time it does, or maybe the way that Edward never truly has the kinds of encounters with strangers that he rails against often during the film, almost as if implying they weren't real. And then there's the whole bodycast/recovery/murder sequence...

I don't know what to make of that stuff. It's bold. It's well-done. It definitely implies a meaning, some kind of diaphonous statement you can almost see... but when you grab at it, it breaks up like fog. In the end, I have no idea what the film thinks the meaning is to some of these moments. Am I missing something, or are these just handsome bits that ultimately did nothing to help the film's issue of not being a fully complete and satiafying story?

Sebastian Stan does do some phenomenal physical work here. The way he carries himself, always hunched, his head ducked low, arms hanging, awkwardly flinching away from interaction, regardless of what his face looks like, really nails down the film's central theme. For a lot of the film, he wears some really impressive make-up and prosthetics, all to mimick the neurofibromatosis condition that dominates his pre-procedure face. And this led to one of the film's most intriguing aspects for me. I liked how the film interrogates itself over and over, examining, turning over, breaking down, even having the characters discuss the questions in the context of the play, asking itself... "Is this cool? Like, should we do this for a story? Should we have an abled actor play a character with a disability? Are we casting the disabled actor simply because they have the right disability?" It asks itself some difficult questions, questions that would have come up in a more accusatory kind of way, if it hadn't. Of course, then you wonder... did the film only ask itself these questions as a way of deflecting those same questions from others, especially as they don't really come up with any answers. They just ask, and consider, and move on.

Still, I appreciate the film's self-awareness.

I appreciate the way the film examines these questions, and how it refuses to provide the kind of story that the audience is going to expect. Besides, maybe there are no real strict answers. So, yeah, I think the self-reflection is good, sure, but the question of is it enough is a fair one. Your mileage may vary. Honestly, for me, in our current reality, where a selfish and grossly entitled section of the population is now openly living for the chance to be cruel, delighting in their giddy savagery, and all while thinking of themselves as the victims?

A little self-interrogation is a breath of fresh air.

I also like how the film never condescends to Edward. It doesn't automatically treat him as this inherently noble person due to his disability, or as some magical inspiration to us all. He's a well-rounded character, both the good and the bad. He's a person. That's also refreshing.

Adam Pearson is fantastic as Oswald. I remember him from Jonathan Glazer’s phenomenal film Under the Skin, which if you haven't seen, you definitely need to. It's a film that is so good, so surprising, so intense, people who have seen it barely mention the fact Scarlett Johansson is completely naked in it, like the whole deal, even her butthole. Just consider that for a moment, how, at the height of her fame, Scarlett Johansson's nudity is otherwise basically unremarkable in the face of that film's power. It's true too, there's a scene with a family on the beach that will haunt you to your end of days...

Anyway, in that film, Pearson plays a very sad and lonely man, isolated by his disability, and desperate for some kind of human connection, and the depth of his grief and pain is enough to reach across a gulf of understanding, and to stir a fresh consciousness awake. But here, he is much different. Confident and friendly, even somewhat rakish, right from the start, it is clear why Edward would be so jealous of Oswald. He's luminous and undaunted in the world.

Renate Reinsve, meanwhile, who was fantastic in The Worst Person in the World, once again plays a flawed and selfish, but incredibly charming ingenue. She's funny, she's friendly, she's interested in others, but also, there's a manic feel to her that is untrustworthy. You understand why Edward is so drawn to her, but also why he's so hesitant, sure on one hand, that's how he feels in every situation in the world, but also, there's a feeling about her where her mirth might suddenly switch, and lash out. She's like a sparkler. She lights up a room, but she might burn you. It's interesting watching how clearly she enjoys Edward fawning over her, and yet she also seems guilty over it, and how both that need for attention, along with her guilt, are what ends up driving her to write the play.

All in all, even if the story has some falters and missteps, I'd say the film and cast really did a great job communicating who their characters were, and why they did the things they did.

A tale about how opposite halves of the same coin are ultimately still the same coin, you expect the film to be a Beauty and the Beast thing, whether it's a straight-forward retelling, or a reversed one, but you really get neither. Instead, we see how the lives of two men come together and intertwine, showing us that while we're all the same on some levels, it's what inside that counts the most.

Much like The Substance, A Different Man attempts to examine our common insecurites, and those monkeys on our backs that are always weighing us down, telling us that if we could only get rid of our outward failings, if we could only be thinner, prettier, cooler, we’d be happy. While A Different Man doesn't completely work in the end, it does a great job of exposing those monkeys as liars.