A Different Man‘s Exhilarating, Insightful Genre Blend Is More than Skin Deep
You can change your hair, you can change your clothes, you can surgically change your face to that of Hollywood hunk Sebastian Stan, and you’ll still be the same awkward, unlikeable weirdo on the inside. Or at least, that’s what writer/director Aaron Schimberg asserts in A Different Man, an exhilarating blend of body horror, dark comedy, sci-fi and romance. Even with all the power of the 21st century’s most scientifically advanced beautifying technology, the human race has still not figured out a medical surgery to make us better people, perhaps because this wouldn’t be a particularly profitable industry (but that’s a discussion for another time).
It’s not that Edward (Sebastian Stan), an unsuccessful actor afflicted with neurofibromatosis, is a particularly vain individual. In fact, he’s hesitant to undergo the radical facial surgery that eradicates his disfigurement. It just so happens that the surgery gives Edward Patrick Bateman levels of handsomeness. Can you blame Edward for taking that chance? Who among us wouldn’t opt to look a hundred times more conventionally attractive?
It’s once Edward abandons his own name for a fake sounding one and forsakes his former nice guy identity for a new debaucherous life as a wealthy real estate asshole that we realize, hey, maybe this wasn’t such a great guy to begin with. On top of that, maybe I, the viewer, am also an asshole for assuming Edward was a decent guy just because his face was deformed. This is a layer that Schimberg explored with his previous film Chained for Life; is it more morally deplorable to gawk at or to pity the severely deformed?
We can judge Edward’s new neighbor Ingrid (The Worst Person In the World’s Renate Reinsve), an aspiring playwright, for not giving him a chance because of his affliction, and we can judge her for many other things later on that I would hate to spoil, but it is more difficult to judge her for rejecting Edward once his true colors shine through. I was fully prepared to write Ingrid off as a classic manic pixie dream girl when she first busts down Edward’s door wearing a yellow crop top and matching yellow booty shorts that reveal her abs, fawning over his typewriter and adorably asking about his childhood photos, but I underestimated Schimberg’s understanding of the darker and more insidious parts of the female psyche.
It becomes clear that Ingrid has no qualms about lying to herself and using the pain of others for her own artistic gain. Just as it is easy for us to assume Edward was a good person because he was hideous, it is easy for us to assume Ingrid was inherently “good” because of her undeniable beauty and charm. As fate would have it, Ingrid writes a play that feels eerily similar to Edward’s life pre-surgery, and she’s searching for a lead actor—the role Edward was “born to play.” Edward’s newfound beauty is now a curse, and he clings desperately to what could have been.
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