A Different Man (2024)

Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man arrives with the Sundance pedigree and the A24 imprimatur, and it spends its runtime declining the comforts either might suggest. Edward, played by Sebastian Stan under a great deal of latex, is a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis who submits to an experimental cure, invents a death for himself, and reemerges as a handsome real estate agent named Guy Moratz. Then his former neighbor Ingrid writes a play about the man he used to be, and the whole arrangement curdles. This is a dark comedy in the sense that it is funny in ways that leave a mark.

The casting is the film's most deliberate gesture. Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis, plays Oswald, the confident interloper who takes Edward's role and, eventually, his life. The production puts performers with facial differences in front of the camera instead of burying able-bodied stars under prosthetics, and it does so without pausing to congratulate itself. The result is a study of self-loathing and the gap between how a face is read and what a person is worth. Oswald is not a lesson. He is a man with a better attitude and a better agent, and Edward cannot forgive him for it.

Elsewhere the film keeps its ambitions narrow. Ingrid has creative agency and a certain ruthlessness, though the screenplay is after existential humiliation, not a critique of patriarchy. Edward's wealth carries a faint satirical shimmer about status and success, nothing more. There is no racial commentary, no environmental thread, no queer subtext, and no sermon waiting at the end. The comedy is unsettling and unresolved, holding a mirror to vanity without ever telling us what to think. That restraint is the film's quiet achievement.