Daring psychological drama A Different Man plays an unsettling identity game | Canada Voices

• A Different Man
• Written and directed by Aaron Schimberg
• Starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve and Adam Pearson
• Classification 14A; 112 minutes
• Opens in select theatres Sept. 27

Critic’s Pick

There’s a sex scene at the centre of A Different Man that encapsulates everything this daring, unsettling, slightly grimy-looking film is about.

Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a playwright in New York, is in bed with a man she knows as Guy (Sebastian Stan). They’ve been workshopping a play she wrote about her former neighbour Edward, an actor with neurofibromatosis (a condition that causes tumours to grow on the head and elsewhere in the body) with whom she had a gentle flirtation. Ingrid thinks Edward died. Unbeknownst to her, Edward is Guy – post an experimental procedure that made his tumours disappear and rendered him unrecognizably, conventionally handsome.

Guy’s doctors gave him a mask of his pre-procedure face; he’s wearing that mask on stage to play Edward. Now Ingrid asks Guy to wear the mask during sex. He does, and for a moment, we see his whole body relax. He’d expected life as Guy to be an improvement; instead, he’s been struggling with how unmalleable his identity is. Somehow, wearing the mask lets him feel like himself, but a self he chooses. Then abruptly his peace shatters, and his discontent floods back in. Can anything “fix” us if we don’t fix ourselves?

A Different Man is the second film in as many weeks (after The Substance, starring Demi Moore as an actress who takes a drug that creates a younger version of herself) to address the radical ways humans are remaking their physiognomies in order to look “better” and by extension, be more worthy of admiration, acceptance and love. It percolates with questions: Did I make my own life, or is my biology destiny? Would improving my face improve my fate? Can we change our inner identity, or is the old adage true, that wherever you go, there you are?

Complicating matters, before the sex scene occurs, Guy meets Oswald (Adam Pearson), who also has neurofibromatosis but is serenely uncowed by it: He’s a lively, sax-playing raconteur who does yoga in the park, makes friends easily and seems to like himself just fine as he is. Ingrid likes Oswald, too – soon enough, he takes over Guy’s place in both Ingrid’s play and her heart – and Guy finds himself in the baffling position of being jealous of the self he ran away from.

Pearson, Reinsve and particularly Stan go all out here – he makes his perfect features look bland and blank, and proves that short-sleeved plaid shirts tucked into chinos will deglamorize even a superhero. And there is no corner of uncomfortableness that writer/director Aaron Schimberg won’t poke into.

The film raises a couple of unintended questions: Why would someone as miserable in his skin as Edward become an actor in the first place? Why, once he looked like Guy, would he become a real estate agent instead? But most of the questions are the good kind, the ones you leave the theatre asking yourself.