Themes of ‘identity’ and ‘role-playing’ swirl intensely in this decent offering starring the Berlinale award-winning Sebastian Stan, who plays a disfigured man who begins to morph into a normal-looking person after an experimental clinical trial.

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The film that won Sebastian Stan the Best Leading Performance at Berlinale earlier this year, A Different Man also stars Renate Reinsve (of 2021’s The Worst Person in the World) and Adam Pearson(best known for playing opposite Scarlett Johannsson in 2013’s Under the Skin). 

All give fantastic performances and they will tide you through the film’s narrative, which I wouldn’t say is straightforward to grasp. 

It is not convoluted but there are more complex ideas of ‘identity’ and ‘role-playing’ swirling around here than in, say, Ghostlight (2024), which although an entirely different film, has theatre and acting as a common device. 

Stan is Edward, a disfigured man who lives alone with no social life.  After participating in an experimental clinical trial, he begins to morph into a normal-looking person without anyone knowing. 

“It’s kind of brilliant seeing you who looks like you, but you’re not yourself.”

Despite being blessed with a new lease on life, Edward begins to doubt his newfound confidence when the disfigured and highly sociable Oswald (Pearson) ‘steals’ the theatre role written based on him, playing the ‘Edward’ he had been glad to shed but still determined to ‘own’. 

A Different Man, while conceptually interesting, ultimately regresses into its self-loathing logic, which makes it less transcendent a film than Schimberg might have imagined it to be. 

Still, it has its revelatory moments, asking us to think about our real, constructed and performed personas, while at the same time exploring that longstanding debate over whether it is critical to cast, say, a disfigured person to play a disfigured character or have an actor do it with makeup. 

A Different Man rightly poses no answer, nor should there be a right one in the first place in the creative realm of acting and storytelling, and in a free marketplace of ideas. 

Grade: B+

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