You could easily get the wrong impression from advance publicity for Aaron Schimberg’s impressively original slate-grey comedy. Sebastian Stan won best lead performance at Berlin for his turn as Edward, a man with neurofibromatosis, a highly disfiguring condition, who is magically cured only to discover that life can be cruel for even the visually appealing. Adam Pearson, who has that same disease, is also in the film. I had assumed that Pearson, so good in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, was playing the earlier version of Edward, but, as it happens, he turns up late on as a sort of walking rebuke to the now-transformed protagonist.
The conceit works beautifully. Pearson’s Oswald is a delightful creation, a borderline luvvie who, resplendent in theatrical cravat, celebrates life by charming adjacent women with crush-bar repartee. Edward’s barely expressed frustration at Oswald’s advance is the tastiest irony in a film bubbling with such reversals.
We begin in territory close to that of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid. Edward lives in a crumbling, often hostile apartment building with neighbours who treat his condition with varying degrees of unease. A hole in the ceiling lets in rats when it’s not letting in too much water. One day he encounters Ingrid (Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World), a Scandinavian neighbour, who is trying to become a playwright. She initially responds to Edward with a shriek but, in her defence, soon settles into a friendly relationship. He is a bit of an actor – mostly in hilariously stilted public-information films – so they may be able to help one another out.
The film meets its fulcrum when an experimental trial begins to work on Edward. Almost overnight he is transformed into Bucky Barns from Captain America, and after declaring Edward dead he reinvents himself as a slick, successful estate agent. There is a little of Daniel Keyes’s novel Flowers for Algernon here. Be careful what you wish for.
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As the film careers into a chaotic final act it loses its way a little. There is a sense of Schimberg flailing around in search of an ending. But Pearson’s rise as foil to the increasingly hapless Edward injects a subversive energy into those closing scenes. A welcome oddity.
A Different Man is in cinemas from Friday, October 4th
