A Different Man

Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man is a darkly comic psychological drama that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2024, before A24 released it in U.S. theaters on September 20, 2024. Sebastian Stan plays Edward, a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis whose face is heavily disfigured, and the film tracks what happens when an experimental procedure gives him a new one. Renate Reinsve appears as Ingrid, a playwright who moves into his building, and Adam Pearson plays Oswald, a man with the same condition who is comfortable in ways Edward is not.

Schimberg wrote the script with Stan and Pearson in mind, having worked with Pearson on Chained for Life (2018), a loose companion piece about an actor with a facial difference and the ethics of representation. The film was produced by Christine Vachon, Vanessa McDonnell, and Gabriel Mayers through Killer Films and Grand Motel Films. Wyatt Garfield shot it in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Umberto Smerilli composed the score.

Critics responded warmly: 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 78 on Metacritic. The box office was modest, $1,169,365 worldwide. Stan's performance earned him a Best Actor nomination at the 97th Academy Awards, the film's only Oscar nod, along with nominations at the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the Critics' Choice Awards. [edit]

Edward lives in a cramped New York apartment and auditions for roles that do not come. Neurofibromatosis has left his face heavily disfigured, and the city responds to him with a mixture of pity and irritation, neither of which he can do much about. His landlord treats him as a nuisance. Casting directors treat him as a curiosity. He has learned to keep his life small.

Then Ingrid moves into the building. She is a playwright, warm and curious, and she does not flinch at his appearance. Edward is drawn to her immediately and begins to hope that the friendship might become something more. Ingrid is writing a play, and Edward's condition becomes material for it. She wants to understand his experience, and he lets her in, hungry for connection, even as he senses that her interest may be more anthropological than romantic.

Around the same time, Edward enrolls in an experimental medical trial. The procedure is risky and unproven, but it promises a radically different face. He goes through with it. The treatment works, and Edward emerges with a conventionally handsome face. He adopts a new identity, calling himself Guy and telling people he works in real estate. Edward, for practical purposes, ceases to exist.

The world responds to Guy differently. People are warmer. Doors open. He is treated with a baseline of respect he never knew, and the film is careful to show how quickly he gets used to it. But the transformation does not solve the problem he thought it would. Ingrid never learned what happened to Edward, and by now she has finished her play, a work about a man with his condition, and is casting it. Edward, unrecognizable, auditions for the role of a lifetime: himself.

Oswald enters the picture around this point. He has neurofibromatosis too, but he is outgoing, funny, and magnetic, everything Edward is not. He becomes close to Ingrid, and Edward watches with growing jealousy as the man he might have been takes center stage in the life he wanted. The film's central conflict is Edward's realization that changing his face did not change who he is, and that the person he envies may simply be a better-adjusted version of the same condition he fled.

What follows is a series of increasingly uncomfortable and darkly funny encounters: auditions, rehearsals, parties, confrontations. Edward's two identities begin to collapse into each other. The film does not resolve whether he can ever reconcile the person he was with the person he has become.[edit]