Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is ‘a darkly comic psychological thriller’ that plays like an inverted Beauty and the Beast. What happens when the handsome prince turns out to be not all that?
The three central performances are magnificent, and there’s a wry absurdist humour at work but unless you’re a fan of body horror it’s not an easy watch. I often had to look away. I can’t, therefore, say I particularly enjoyed seeing it, but now I have seen it I don’t regret it. Is that, dear readers, fudged enough for you?
Sebastian Stan stars as Edward, an aspiring actor who lives in New York and has neurofibromatosis, the genetic condition where tumours grow under the skin. (This is not what the Elephant Man had; he is thought to have had Proteus syndrome.) Stan is unrecognisable beneath facial prosthetics and if you’re minded to object to a non-facially disfigured actor playing a facially disfigured character then sit tight.
Because we are ‘hot-wired to fear ugly people’ as someone will blithely note, Edward is stared at, laughed at, shunned but also, to be fair, many are not bothered. The young playwright Ingrid (the wonderful Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World), who moves into the apartment next door, is bothered for a second – she blanches with shock – but then isn’t bothered.
The two become friendly. Thinking his deformity would prevent any romance from developing, Edward jumps at the chance of an experimental medical therapy that could ‘cure’ him. The therapy is miraculous and his face peels off – this is the gory bit, where I had to stare into my lap.
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