Film Review: A Different Man
by Rose Finlay

Aaron Schimberg | USA | 2024

Sebastian Stan won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance

Edward (Sebastian Stan) is an actor living in New York City whose neurofibromatosis, a condition of facial tumors, undermines his confidence. He is attracted to his neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), an aspiring playwright. When Edward is offered the opportunity to undergo a transformative medical procedure to remove his neurofibromatosis, he finds his life fundamentally changed. However, he soon discovers that in doing so, he has missed out on the role of a lifetime, and potentially a romantic partner, and his life begins to unravel. Can one’s appearance really change who a person is fundamentally? Or is Edward still doomed to continue on as he began, insecure and lonely?

Director Aaron Schimberg uses this quirky plotline to touch on society’s obsession with appearance, how anything different is often looked on with disgust and fear, and also how the shame of experiencing this stigma on the daily can have a profound impact on a person. However, when Oswald (Adam Pearson), another man with neurofibromatosis, appears in Edward’s life, he soon realizes that maybe the problem never truly lay with his face, but with some inherent flaw within himself. Oswald is charismatic and seemingly content in his life, the type of man everyone wants to be friends with, and despite Edward now inhabiting a conventionally attractive body, he finds his insecurity and jealousy continuing to rear its ugly head. Schimberg deftly uses dark humor and body horror throughout the first half; but as the film veers into a tragicomedy in the third act, it starts to lose its focus as absurdity reigns. But the important question still lingers even after the credits role, how much of our personality is a result of our appearance and how much is actually just who we really are?