“A Different Man” stars Sebastian Stan as Edward, a man with a craniofacial condition that makes him look like a cross between Eric Stoltz in “Mask” and John Hurt in “The Elephant Man.”
Edward is trying to get gigs as an actor, but his look turns off casting directors, so the jobs are few and far between. Meanwhile, when a playwright named Ingrid (Renata Reinsve) moves in next door, Edward is surprised to discover she’s not repelled by his appearance.
Then he hears about an experimental new miracle drug that might help. He signs up for it and, sure enough, his face begins to change until all the growths are gone, leaving him traditionally handsome. At this point, I thought “A Different Man” was going to be another “Flowers for Algernon” or “Awakenings” story, where the treatment radically changes the subject’s life for the better until it wears off and he fully regresses.
But this movie goes in a different direction.
It jumps ahead in time to find Edward has become a successful realtor and moved into a much nicer apartment (the old one had something disgusting leaking through the ceiling from the tenant above). When he goes back to see what’s happening in his former home, he runs into Ingrid. He doesn’t reveal his true identity, but learns that she has written a play based on his old life. He auditions for her and wins the part, but rehearsals are interrupted one day by a British guy named Oswald who has the same affliction Edward had.
Oswald is played by Adam Pearson, who in real life has neurofibromatosis and thus needed none of the prosthetics Stan wore to play Edward. The difference between the two men is more than visual. Despite his financial success, Edward remains an unhappy person who feels victimized by the world, while Oswald is an outgoing, confident man who hasn’t let the disfigurement ruin his life.
Ingrid decides that Oswald would be much better as the star of her off-off-Broadway play, so she casts Edward aside, a rejection he doesn’t know how to handle. After pretending to be someone else, he can’t very well reveal to her that he is the very person she based her story on.
Pearson previously co-starred in writer/director Aaron Schimberg’s “Chained For Life,” which also took place in a theatrical setting. In “A Different Man,” he’s hard to take your eyes off, not because of his face, but because he has does so much with the admittedly showier role. Stan plays Edward as a dour man who, despite his business success, walks around with a grim demeanor — his unattractiveness is internal.
Unfortunately, “A Different Man” leaves a lot of questions unanswered as it moves from plot point to plot point. It also has the weirdest zoom in to an extreme close-up I’ve ever seen in a movie. It actually took me out of the movie for a minute while I wondered why that seeming outtake ended up in the final cut.
The movie is billed as a comedy, but I wouldn’t even call it a dark comedy. Rather, it’s a dramatic misfire by a director who’s trying to say something important but lets gravitas weigh the whole thing down.
I give “A Different Man” a 5 out of 10. Opens today in theaters.