Imagine you could wake up one morning, stand at the mirror, and literally peel off any part of your looks you don’t like — with only movie-star beauty remaining. How would it change your life? How SHOULD it change your life? That’s a question – well, a launching point, really — for Edward, protagonist of Aaron Schimberg’s fascinating, genre-bending, undeniably provocative and occasionally frustrating “A Different Man,” featuring a stellar trio of Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve. The very title is open to multiple interpretations.
Who (and what) is “different”? The original Edward, who has neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes bulging tumors on his face? Or the man he becomes when he’s able to slip out of that skin? And is he “different” to others, or to himself? When we meet Edward, a struggling actor in New York (Stan, in elaborate makeup), he’s filming some sort of commercial. We soon learn it’s an instructional video on how to behave around colleagues with deformities. But even there, the director stops him, offering changes.
“Wouldn’t want to scare anyone,” he says. On Edward’s way home on the subway, people stare. Back at his small apartment building, he meets a young woman in the hallway, in the midst of moving to the flat next door.
She winces visibly when she first sees him, as virtually everyone does. But later, Ingrid (Reinsve) tries to make it up to him, coming over to chat. She is charming and forth.