I had plans to see A Different Man at Sundance this year but I ended up seeing something else at the last minute and I kind of regret that decision. Luckily it is now playing at the Broadway and I got to see it as part of a double feature last night. I enjoyed this surreal black comedy even more than I was expecting. Edward Lemuel (Sebastian Stan) is an actor with a facial deformity caused by neurofibromatosis who struggles to interact with other people, especially a playwright named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) who lives next door, because of an extreme lack of confidence. He volunteers for an experimental drug that could cure his condition and, when it works, he fakes his suicide and starts a new life as a handsome and successful real estate agent named Guy Moratz. Several years later he discovers that Ingrid has written a play about Edward and he impulsively auditions using a mask of his old face. Ingrid casts him, and begins a relationship with him, but struggles with the authenticity of her decision because, even though Guy embodies Edward's insecurities, he is not deformed. Complications ensue when Oswald (Adam Pearson), a confident and charismatic man with neurofibromatosis, appears and replaces him in the play and in Ingrid's life. The tone is all over the place with elements of body horror, dark comedy, science fiction, and romance but I love that it subverts expectations about identity and what makes someone a good person. Stan, in some fantastic prosthetics during the first act, gives an incredibly nuanced performance as a man who gets what he thinks he wants and then comes undone when he realizes that it didn't change anything while Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis, is enchanting as his foil. Not everything works (I'm still trying to figure out why so many things drop from the ceiling) but this is both thought-provoking and highly entertaining.
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