A Different Man

Written by Tom Augustine.

There are few times this year that I’ve felt a deeper feeling of empathetic despair than in the early stretches of Adam Schimberg’s A Different Man. Schimberg, working in tandem with actor Sebastian Stan (beneath acres of makeup), paints a bleak portrait of Edward Lemuel, a man living with neurofibromatosis (a condition that manifests as benign tumours on the face) existing in a kind of enforced solitude and anxiety so devastatingly acute that I felt tears springing forth. The nature of Edward’s condition means that he wears his vulnerability outside of himself, a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. My experience of the world is nothing like that of someone with this condition, but anyone with a body even slightly outside the norm knows the feeling of simmering conspicuousness, the unconscious shame others unload upon you for existing in a space differently. It results in an apologetic shiftiness, a position which implies that you are willing to cede your comfort in the name of others, because that’s the way it should be. It’s something that Edward, battered down by a life of averted gazes and a general societal dismissal, has become used to, even as he pursues an acting career in which the only roles he can get are how-to guides for businesses increasing their diversity numbers by hiring people with different needs and abilities. The world around him seems coated in the grime of Edward’s misery – greys and sickly greens, feverish yellows and lifeless browns abound. One of the tenants of Edward’s building is found hanging by his neck after interacting with Edward. There’s a foul substance dripping from his ceiling. Even the one bright spot in Edward’s life, the presence of his flighty playwright neighbour Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), is defined by the confidence she has in her conventional attractiveness and her aggressively myopic self-interest.

The tragicomic, Kafkaesque revelations of the second half of A Different Man, one of the best films of the year, wouldn’t work without this early stretch of aching desolation. It’s a film about a Faustian bargain, one that damns Edward by saving him from the life he has. That salvation comes in the form of a radical, experimental treatment for Edward’s tumours, one that promises to dramatically change the configuration of his face. After being injected with a strange substance, Edward’s tumours begin to fall away in stunningly gory fashion, to reveal the natural beauty of Stan’s real face beneath. Edward is born anew, a sentiment he commits wholeheartedly to by telling all those in his orbit that Edward is dead. It’s only after Edward begins to get laid, ascends quickly in a flashy real estate gig, and moves into a schintzy new apartment that he begins to feel a gnawing emptiness. That’s when A Different Man begins to fold in on itself in an ambitious conceptual gambit: Ingrid, in their time apart, has written a play about her brief encounter with the man she knew as Edward, and the new Edward finds himself impulsively auditioning for the role. This coincides with the arrival of Oswald (played by Adam Pearson, an actor actually living with neurofibromatosis that many will recognise from Under the Skin), who has the same condition as Edward did but seems completely unperturbed by it, living a life of joy and success, sparking the fire of jealousy in our hero. 

A picture quite unlike any other to come out of the United States this year, Adam Schimberg’s remarkable Faustian fable is unsettling, tragic and farcical in equal measure. Driven by Sebastian Stan’s remarkable lead performance, it announces the arrival of a major artist of current New York cinema.

Director Adam Schimberg is likely to be a new name for most New Zealand viewers. His previous work, Chained for Life, also starred Pearson but, as far as I know, never landed on these shores. With this film, which also screened at this year’s Whanau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival, Schimberg has risen to another level of notability, emerging as a much-buzzed-about new auteur of New York cinema. It’s true that A Different Man feels almost completely unique to the other films emerging from the USA in the modern era – it wears the skin of a Seventies American auteurist, but mingles that with an almost gothic sensibility, resulting in something altogether darker and more foetid than one might expect. In a sense, the moral of A Different Man is quite simple – be careful what you wish for – but Schimberg’s careful management of tone and commitment to following Edward’s tragicomic spiritual downfall to its natural plateaus ensure that idea feels tied to some ancient element of the human experience, rather than something trite or easy to contain. 

Schimberg also benefits from a hungry, locked-in cast, with the central trio playing intriguingly against type. Reinsve, perhaps the most odious character in a film chock full of them, slowly reveals her true nature with cunning subtlety, eschewing the markers of the (literal)  ‘Girl Next Door’ type that one expects Ingrid to be as the film opens. Pearson, meanwhile, is a perfectly timed grenade in the fabric of the story, tearing Edward’s conception of himself both pre- and post-transformation into shreds. Pearson’s Oswald is charming, suave, a ladies’ man, the talk of the town. It’s a challenge he’s more than up for, his perky British affect a jarring record scratch in the landscape of A Different Man’s miserablism. All told, though, the film belongs to Stan, who delivers what is one of the year’s very best performances – one he was justifiably awarded for at Sundance Film Festival, where the film premiered. As I said in my recent review of The Apprentice, 2024 has been a hell of a year for Stan, one in which he’s emerged from behind the Marvel machine and his boyish good looks to reveal a risk-taking and chameleonic performer. This is far and away his best work, often using only his eyes to tell the story of an entire life. Those eyes, post-transformation, reveal the old Edward living within the new, accentuating the tragedy of the man’s soul-death.   

It’s perhaps to be expected that A Different Man would find itself compared so regularly to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the grabbier, louder 2024 film that shares an interest in gory body transformation and split identities. The comparison of the two, though, is fairly arbitrary and does a disservice to both excellent films. The Substance, a winkingly shlocky B-picture that goes full grand guignol in its final act, has entirely different concerns to the novelistic ambitions of Schimberg’s film. A Different Man is relentlessly concerned with the interior agony of Edward’s emotional landscape. Schimberg lays this tale out with mercilessness, but tenderness too. We’re never less than thoroughly tuned into Edward’s frequency. What is most heartbreaking about this film is that, even with all its tragicomical, grim twists of fate, there’s an air of hopeless drabness that permeates. The feeling of, to paraphrase John Mulaney, ‘this might as well happen’. It’s that thing when you go on holiday, where you find you still have to bring yourself along. Edward is offered an escape hatch, only to find himself back where he started. In that, Schimberg shares the stage with the likes of not only Kafka, but great modern prescriptors of existential nightmares like Charlie Kaufman or the Coen Brothers. It’s that strong of an offering.