A movie that is as a lot about its personal gimmick as what that gimmick represents, Aaron Schimberg’s A Completely different Man casts Sebastian Stan as Edward, a person with pronounced facial variations that he finally sheds via a miracle remedy. Nevertheless, when a now historically good-looking Edward is solid in a play about his personal life, the thorny query of inventive illustration is broached in discomforting and hilarious methods.

Nevertheless, the movie would not simply draw consideration to its choice to solid a reasonably Hollywood face as a person with neurofibromatosis. That will be too straightforward an escape hatch, and too superficial a personality examine. As an alternative, it additional complicates its questions of optics and politics by having an actual actor with the identical situation as Edward play a big position within the movie: Adam Pearson, who is thought for showing in Jonathan Glazer’s Below the Pores and skin, after which he turned a public advocate towards “disfigurement stigma.” Pearson additionally starred in Schimberg’s 2018 movie Chained For Life.

Pearson’s charismatic arrival, as a person who threatens to usurp the position of Edward from himself, sends Edward down a surreal emotional spiral. This on-screen conflict of fiction and actuality not solely forces an odd, poignant self-reflection — for Edward, and for the movie as a complete — nevertheless it additionally creates an fascinating meta-text that tells its personal story concerning the actors within the movie. It is as a lot a story of outward look as it’s internal anxieties, a stability Schimberg strikes in cautious methods as he crafts a shocking, distinctly New York comedy-drama about seeing oneself.

What’s A Completely different Man about?

Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, and Adam Pearson star in “A Completely different Man.”
Credit score: Berlinale Movie Competition

As Edward mopes round his house constructing, avoiding interactions as greatest he can, neighbors and numerous handymen alternatingly stare and supply well mannered however compelled nods, as if it takes them particular effort to keep away from mentioning his variations. Edward is an actor, and never an altogether horrible one, although his roles are restricted — not solely by his look, however by his utter lack of self-confidence. Edward is midway between invisible and hyper-visible; some do not see him as totally human or as a viable romantic curiosity, whereas others cease and stare. He exists in limbo, trudging alongside day-to-day in his cramped, dilapidated New York house, which Schimberg and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield seize with a way of dirty texture.

When Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a pretty wannabe playwright from Europe, strikes in subsequent door, Edward’s prospects lastly appear to alter. After an preliminary skepticism, she takes a curious curiosity in him, and even affords to put in writing a play for him to star in. Nevertheless, his lack of conversational abilities can not help however create a clumsy dynamic each time they chat, as if he had been some pet mission for her to foster. Regardless of the actuality, Edward’s hunched-over physique language and mousey demeanor trace at a sort of emotional impenetrability, as if he’ll learn the worst in any state of affairs as a result of it is the remedy he is come to anticipate.

Nevertheless, when a radical medical process verging on sci-fi physique horror guarantees him a brand new life, Edward takes benefit of it in a really literal method, utilizing his new face to begin a model new life and “killing off” the outdated Edward as if he had been a fictional character. Time goes by, and he finds skilled success in actual property — a forward-facing profession — as a good-looking man named Man. However upon discovering Ingrid has written a play about his life, his curiosity will get the higher of him, and he auditions with the assistance of a flimsy prosthetic masks.

Though Ingrid intends to solid somebody with facial variations within the position, which she insists she did not base on any actual individual, Man’s efficiency convinces her that he’s a miraculously an ideal match, although he would not have any facial variations. He embodies all of Edward’s gestures and his bodily and emotional  anguish, even in scenes the place Ingrid imagines conversations and internal monologues that do not match what we’ve seen unfold between them in earlier scenes, again when Man was nonetheless Edward. The play, it appears, is born from Ingrid’s restricted, patronizing perspective on Edward. The extra this stage manufacturing goes on, the extra Edward is compelled to reckon with the previous, and with realizations the movie presents via stark, unsettling zooms into his bewildered expression. Regardless of having a brand new face, he should still be the identical lonely, depressing individual on the within; maybe now greater than ever, since now he has nobody with whom he can share the reality about who he as soon as was.

Sebastian Stan delivers an impeccable efficiency.

As an actor taking part in two variations of a personality, and subsequently taking part in a 3rd, fictitious model — one he cannot play too properly, lest he be came upon — Stan is shouldered with a monumentally advanced activity. The prosthetics used to craft his variations permit him to emote inside cause, however posture and motion are the instruments via which he constructs Edward. 

Not solely does Stan excellent the ticks and eccentricities of a decidedly common actor (i.e. the true Edward pre-procedure), however when he is reborn as Man and solid as Ingrid’s conception of Edward, he crafts a way of metamorphosis and regression. Because the historically handsome Man taking part in this Edward, he delves deep into the susceptible anxieties the character had begun to suppress as a part of his new life, if solely to attempt to deliver some quantity of honesty to a task he believes is dishonest. 

These multi-layered complexities yield fascinating scenes of rehearsal and rewriting, bringing to the fore the movie’s innate query of whether or not individuals far outdoors Edward’s bodily and emotional expertise are able to telling his story. Paradoxically, the aspect the film appears to come back down on is a hesitant “perhaps not,” a minimum of so far as Ingrid is anxious. However Schimberg will not be Ingrid, and he is underneath no delusions of passing off Edward as a piece of pure creativeness.

That is largely as a result of to anybody who’s seen Pearson earlier than — whether or not in a film, a TEDx Speak, or his quite a few wrestling sport present appearances — it is clear that Edward, performed by Stan, is distinctly modeled off Pearson, and the story virtually exists in order that he can present up in some capability. The very information that Pearson is concerned with the movie, and that Schimberg has labored with him earlier than, colours A Completely different Man in a brand new mild, and brings a completely exterior context to Stan’s efficiency. 

In fact, even with out this data, this context stays discomforting. Both method, Stan is taking part in a person he theoretically should not be, the identical method Man carrying prosthetics to play Edward should be seen as ill-advised to these round him (because of the problematic nature of “performing” bodily incapacity and of robbing a disabled actor of a uncommon alternative). Nevertheless, Man’s in-world clarification for Ingrid as to why he is capable of so deeply faucet into the character of Edward is illuminating too. He concocts a lie about having as soon as been greatest mates with somebody with facial variations, which he claims not solely provides him license to inform this story however permits him to inform it intimately and empathetically.

That is doubtless akin to Schimberg’s personal reasoning too. Having turn out to be mates with Pearson after their collaboration on Chained For Life — a movie that embodies related debates — he has made a complete film “about” him in quite a few methods, treating him as each idea and human being… However who does Pearson play within the film? Properly, that is a completely completely different delight.

Whereas watching the movie, one is perhaps inclined to imagine it options the most effective work of Stan’s profession; it even gained him Berlin Movie Competition’s Silver Bear for Greatest Main Efficiency. Nevertheless, even this reward is designed to be second-guessed behind one’s thoughts, since his position is one which tasks a lifetime of awkwardness and isolation onto Edward from individuals outdoors his expertise — one other concept the film self-reflexively lampoons via debates between Man and Ingrid. And simply when it looks like this ethical conundrum is one the movie would possibly keep away from, it crafts an explosive different.

Hastily, Pearson exhibits up as an eccentric man named Oswald, an equally curious actor who stumbles upon Ingrid’s manufacturing. From the second he seems, he delivers a efficiency so radical in its conception that he basically modifications what A Completely different Man is even about.

Adam Pearson is the movie’s not-so-secret weapon.

Between movies like The Elephant Man and Schimberg’s Chained for Life, facial variations on display have been tied intently to pity and moroseness, an concept with which A Completely different Man consistently toys through Edward’s story. Nevertheless, for anybody aware of the true Pearson — as Schimberg little question is — he seems to be pretty upbeat and well-adjusted, regardless of talking concerning the bullying in his previous. The movie’s plot is a few character with the identical situation as Pearson, however Edward’s actuality would not appear to match Pearson’s within the slightest. So, so as to additional spotlight this disconnect, Schimberg writes Pearson a task that swings towards a very completely different excessive that vastly reimagines the kind of roles that should be out there to actors no matter variations, facial or in any other case.

The second Oswald seems, he passive aggressively feedback on Ingrid’s casting alternative together with his posh enunciation — Oswald, like Pearson, hails from London— a small element that yanks the movie in an much more head-spinning route. Oswald is all the pieces Edward needs he might be: a brash playboy who reads individuals like a e book, wears ostentatious shirts, and worms his method into social {and professional} circles with ease.

Pearson performs the position with slick, easy panache. Every second he is on-screen is extremely thrilling; Oswald swallows each scene entire, virtually sapping Edward’s power as he is compelled to confront an uncanny reflection of himself who represents truths he may not wish to face. Is that this who Edward might’ve been all alongside? And, extra importantly, is the lie he is dwelling price it?

The extra these questions torture Edward, the extra surreal A Completely different Man turns into. Its very premise begins to really feel like a fever dream, buoyed by escalating interpersonal tensions as Oswald forces his method right into a consulting position on the play. Slowly however certainly, he begins imposing his personal, supposedly extra “genuine” imaginative and prescient of Edward’s life on Edward’s personal story, till the query of whether or not or not Oswald ought to merely exchange Man within the play turns into unavoidable. The idea of authenticity is so stretched and contorted by these developments that it turns into thematic taffy, with no distinct or stable type.

Nevertheless, as A Completely different Man piles layer upon layer of confounding complication, it stays emotionally true to itself, which is to say, each to Edward’s more and more paranoid self-reflection, and to Schimberg’s scrutiny of his personal work (each this movie, in addition to Chained For Life). The movie neither shies away from its innate surrealness, nor hesitates to get its arms soiled with regards to actual and important conversations on whose tales can and needs to be instructed (and extra importantly, how), though it displays every of its ideas on the topic via a funhouse mirror.

By grounding its story in a personality drama before everything, A Completely different Man anchors its many plot zig-zags, and its anxieties about its personal existence, to a tangible emotional actuality. Schimberg walks a razor-thin line between honest self-critique and gaudy exploitation, and within the course of, virtually erases the boundary between them. The top end result reveals uncomfortably humorous new modes of on-screen illustration, expressed in methods each revolutionary and thrilling. 

A Completely different Man was reviewed out of the Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition.