Face off: "A Different Man"

With 2019's Chained for Life, their blackly comic tale of a low-budget art film beset by interpersonal woes, the American writer-director Aaron Schimberg and Croydon-born actor Adam Pearson initiated a smart and useful new screen partnership. I say useful, because Pearson - hitherto best known as the most memorable of the sorry suckers lured to their grave by Scarlett Johansson's succubus in 2013's Under the Skin - was diagnosed as a child with neurofibromatosis, a disfiguring disorder that causes non-cancerous tumours to flourish in the nervous system. Whenever a camera is pointed in Pearson's direction, then, it offers an opportunity to re-examine, arguably a century too late, how we look at movies, and the people in movies, and more generally how we look at humankind. The pair's latest collaboration A Different Man, a canny refinement of that earlier film with an A24 budget and an MCU-approved star attached to it, has just shown up at your local multiplex, which would suggest the Schimberg-Pearson project is taking root; again, the aim here is to challenge viewer assumptions around physical beauty in ways that are playful and stealthy, and several leagues above the in-yer-face obviousness of last month's The Substance.

The new film describes a bizarre love triangle, centred on Edward (Sebastian Stan), a defensive, shrugging, facially disfigured actor who makes a desultory living in corporate training videos preaching workplace inclusivity. With latex grafting the very specific contours of Pearson's face onto Stan's more conventionally chiselled features, we are invited to view Edward as a downtrodden bizarro-world version of Pearson himself. It takes because this is, from the off, a bizarro world. There's a version of A Different Man that would have insisted on being squeaky clean and unimpeachably PC, careful not to alienate or offend the mass audience - something akin to what we're shown of those corporate training videos. Resolutely unsuperficial, Schimberg instead leans into strangeness and grot. His is a non-aspirational, ever-anxious New York, troubled by sudden bangs and crashes, torrential downpours, swelling damp patches and suicidal neighbours. (When the ambulance arrives to carry one such off to the morgue, the paramedics row with the driver of a passing party bus the vehicle has blocked in.) Yes, a revolutionary new medical treatment permits Edward to slough off his excess of skin, revealing sleek Stan the aspirant A-lister, and this version of the character gets both the girl - Renate Reinsve, a model of upright Nordic perfection as a maneating playwright - and the acting gigs. Yet there's also a problem: he also finds himself being stalked by a doppelganger of his former self, Oswald - and here, finally, is Pearson as he is, lumps, bumps and all, having wicked fun as a reminder of the man Edward used to be, not just a different man but a better man, all cheery banter and yoga classes, where our notional hero continues to tie himself in knots.

Beneath its baroque carapace of self-referentiality and off-kilter authorial style, A Different Man is actually making pretty simple points: that some people would be the same no matter what they looked like, that some people can't past the surfaces of this world, and that this toplayer is less than interesting and revealing. (They're the sort of lessons we might all have learned sooner had the movies not been so busy trying to make us tumble for folks who look like Annie Hathaway and Alain Delon.) Yet Schimberg keeps finding ways to destabilise the drama and thereby unsettle the viewer; as a result, the film becomes thrillingly unpredictable, maybe even the least predictable of 2024. You could stop it an hour in, and no-one in the room would have the least idea of how this matter was going to resolve itself; you could pause it with ten minutes to go, and have even less of an idea. Partly this is due to idiosyncratic pacing. A higher-concept film would doubtless cut far more quickly to the transformation - in part, to liberate Stan's cheekbones for commercial purposes - yet the extra time allows Schimberg to almost surgically reconstruct a wackadoodle idea of New York through his consciously chaotic, Safdiean blocking and framing of bodies. A signature set-up: two characters trying to have a fraught conversation in a doorway while a third attempts to move paints and stepladders between them. In a New York this cramped and curled-up on itself, it's hardly surprising Edward and Oswald should come to cross paths again and again. Physically and otherwise, there's no easy escaping.

There isn't an interaction that isn't intrusive, indelicate or in some other way awkward, and there's something very weird going on in the use of Presidents as a running motif: a living statue of Lincoln, some dive bar toilet graffiti ("BLOBBY KENNEDY "[sic]), the fact Oswald is called, well, Oswald. In places, A Different Man has the feel less of Hollywood storytime than a conspiracy we're being ushered into - maybe the conspiracy Edward has running through his head 24/7. The result is that rare beast, a comedy that is formally hilarious, blessed with both an odd shape and deeply funny bones; the great triumph of Schimberg's direction is how it gets us not just comfortable with this, but actively embracing it. Game performers, keen to throw off some of the usual niceties and pieties, assist the film's cause immensely. You wonder how many A-listers turned this script down - either not getting the joke, or realising the joke would be on them - before it trickled down to Stan, but the actor's exasperated expression, something like Mark Hamill having a really bad day, is a gag that gets only funnier scene by scene, a mask of unhappiness Edward cannot set aside. Reinsve remains amusingly unflustered by it all, serving as a yardstick of normie privilege; and whether donning a mumu or chasing a balloon through a park, Pearson is just full of the joys of spring. (His karaoke-night rendition of an original song, "I Wanna Get Next to You", is more subversive than anything The Substance lobbed at us, the type of nightclub number the movies have never thought to film.) One notes the actor had to travel to the US to make these films: I'm surely answering my own question here, but why couldn't something this curious and adventurous be made closer to home?

A Different Man is now playing in cinemas nationwide.