“This bleakly funny New York-set fable” is about “acting, masks and, oh yes, the ultimate emptiness of the self”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Marvel veteran Sebastian Stan dons prosthetics to play Edward, a would-be actor with neurofibromatosis, a rare disorder that has left him disfigured by tumours.
At first, we see him shuffling around in “self-hating despair” – but his life starts to change when he meets Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), an attractive playwright who promises to write him a lead part; then, he is offered an experimental cure, raising the prospect of “romance and alleged normalcy”. As his old face is graphically “ripped apart”, to reveal Stan’s square-jawed good looks, the stage seems set for a “handsome male success story” – but that is when this “original and daring” film “begins to get really devious”.
Jumping forward in time, Edward has reinvented himself as “Guy”, a successful estate agent with a “swish loft”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. But when he reconnects with Ingrid, he discovers to his shock that she has gone ahead and written the play about his former self. And the part goes not to him, but to Oswald (the British actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis). Oswald’s face is also covered in tumours, but he is everything Edward was not: “popular, funny, charming”.
Director Aaron Schimberg has great fun with a film that is “part absurdist black comedy, part Kafkaesque dragon-punch to the soul, part Jekyll-and-Hyde morality tale”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Brilliantly anticipating “every ethical qualm you might have, and every artistic parallel you might spot”, “A Different Man” doesn’t just recognise life’s “messiness – it makes it into a joyride”.