‘Different Man’: Sebastian Stan’s Mind-Blowing New Psychosexual Thriller
Reteaming with his Chained for Life star Adam Pearson, Aaron Schimberg delivers a deliriously inventive and deranged mind-fuck with A Different Man. A riff on John Frankenheimer’s Seconds that also synthesizes into its demented DNA trace elements of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Naked Lunch, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (not to mention Beauty and the Beast), the writer/director’s latest is an audacious and electric psychosexual thriller of identity. Featuring a career-best performance from Sebastian Stan, stellar work by Pearson and Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World, Handling the Undead), and a formal daring that’s in service of a story that continually warps, twists, and curls inward on itself, it’s one of 2024’s undisputed early highlights as well as the most exciting premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Edward (Sebastian) is a loner with neurofibromatosis, a condition that’s severely disfigured his face with enormous tumors. A Different Man introduces him howling in distress in an office break room. As it turns out, this is an on-camera performance for a sensitivity training video, although Edward is in actual pain. Perpetually beset by looks of disgust, scorn and the sort of pitying horror that causes eyes to quickly dart away, Edward has retreated into himself, his body language slumped and shuffling, and his speech halting and downbeat. Edward lives in an apartment whose ceiling has a water leak, and the spreading mold and expanding hole (through which black liquid and dead rats fall) are perfect manifestations of his misery.
Quoting Lady Gaga (!), a fellow resident tells Edward that “all happiness in life comes from not accepting what is,” and Edward certainly loathes himself, longing for the opportunity to be an unassuming everyman who walks arm-in-arm with a woman in the moonlight. At a check-up, his doctor discloses that there’s an experimental trial (the first of its kind) for a potential “cure” for his condition, and with his usual air of glum resignation, Edward agrees to participate. After having his face scanned, from which these physicians create a replica mask of his deformed visage, they give him some drugs and begin monitoring his progress. Simultaneously, Edward’s life is thrown for a loop when beautiful aspiring playwright Ingrid (Reinsve) moves into the apartment next door and initiates an intimate friendship that just makes him pine that much harder for her, even though she already has a boyfriend and his gift of an antique typewriter sadly makes little impression.