An Completely different, Unlikable Man
Sure, Sebastian Stan portrayed real-life monster Donald Trump in 2024’s The Apprentice, however his greatest villain efficiency of the 12 months got here within the A24 movie A Completely different Man, written and directed by Aaron Schimberg. A Completely different Man follows Edward’s life earlier than and after he will get a miracle remedy for his neurofibromatosis, which has left his face disfigured since beginning. Edward sees himself as a very completely different man, and even begins calling himself “Man Moratz” and claiming that Edward died. However as Edward as Man integrates higher into society, his anger and bitterness intensifies.
That quick description makes A Completely different Man sound like a film about studying that magnificence is barely pores and skin deep; that it’s what’s inside that counts. However Schimberg has one thing extra advanced, and extra cynical, in thoughts.
Man’s beauty permit him to change into a high-powered actual property agent, profitable with money and ladies. Nonetheless, he retains returning to the theater, and specifically to Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a struggling playwright who as soon as lived subsequent door to Edward. Man discovers that Ingrid has written a play about Edward and he desperately desires the half, to the purpose the place he begins carrying a masks of the face he had eliminated.
Schimberg heightens the irony not solely by having Man get offended at Ingrid for the condescending method she romanticizes Edward’s life, actually describing his romance to her stand-in as a “Magnificence and the Beast story,” but additionally by inserting a 3rd particular person within the type of Oswald. Performed by Adam Pearson, an actor who truly has neurofibromatosis, Oswald charms everybody, embodying the success that Man thought not possible when he was Edward.
To its credit score, A Completely different Man makes all three members of this triad terrible in their very own methods, with out making them inhuman monsters. Oswald’s extraordinarily extroverted habits permits him to ignore the sentiments of others and ignore the way in which that Ingrid fetishizes him, permitting her to middle herself in a narrative that’s not hers. That dyspeptic twist, in the meantime, provides Stan loads of area to play a bitter, dirty man. In a single pleasant sequence, Oswald joins Ingrid and the actors for an after dinner drink and impresses everybody along with his upbeat character. Schimberg cuts from pictures of Ingrid and different ladies laughing traditionally at Oswald, totally unencumbered by his look, to pictures of Man, Stan letting a sneer quiver beneath his character’s smile.
Because the movie builds towards its conventional climax (earlier than shifting into prolonged, and admittedly, pointless fourth and fifth acts), Man turns into extra erratic on stage. Stan exhibits no worry of incurring the viewers’ disgust as he stomps throughout the stage as Man, bellowing as items of facial prosthetics plop from his face. It’s onerous to not hate Man in that second however, as with the entire characters in A Completely different Man, it’s onerous to not relate to him both.
