A Totally different Man Overview – ‘A darkly hilarious satire’

It’s no massive secret that the world holds a slender view on what is gorgeous. It’s there on screens, in pictures, and within the judgemental gaze of each passerby. Otherness is seen as monstrousness. In Aaron Schimberg’s A Totally different Man, the notion that magnificence is within the eye of the beholder is excavated and complex in a darkly hilarious satire about what it means to be enticing, inside and outside.

Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a struggling New York actor with neurofibromatosis, a situation that manifests in sizeable facial tumours, that means the gigs he books quantity to company coaching movies on treating disabled co-workers with respect. Then issues appear to be turning round for him: playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) strikes in subsequent door, and even appears to take an curiosity in him. Later, he’s provided the possibility to participate in an experimental drug trial that guarantees to remedy his ailment.

One minute his face is sort of actually peeling off — occurring in spectacular, sickly trend because of some gross-out prosthetics — the subsequent, he has the good-looking visage of Sebastian Stan. Not a nasty commerce, however no quantity of science can repair what’s inside. Barely in a position to maintain a dialog, Edward continues to be the identical loser he all the time was.

When Ingrid writes a play partially based mostly on her relationship with Edward, Oswald (Adam Pearson) enters the image because the star — and Edward’s day by day tormentor. He, too, has neurofibromatosis, however he oozes confidence and not one of the self-pity that Edwards holds onto. Schimberg’s deft screenplay dangers tying itself in knots over the thorny questions of illustration (is casting an actor with bodily disfigurements exploitative? Is it offensive to painting them as victims?), however A Totally different Man doesn’t search to offer solutions. Primarily, it’s in regards to the sheer breadth of humanity. An individual with neurofibromatosis will be as charismatic as Oswald, or as uninteresting as Edward.

Stan doesn’t let the make-up do all of the heavy lifting in Edward’s transformation, as a substitute cleverly shifting his voice and posture as an example his character’s rising egotism. However it’s Pearson (beforehand recognized for his look in Jonathan Glazer’s Below The Pores and skin) who delivers a riveting, star-making flip. Schimberg wrote A Totally different Man particularly for the actor, after working with him on 2019 movie Chained For Life, hoping to create a personality as vibrant as he’s. Pearson excels, taking part in a person you really imagine would do yoga within the park, kill at karaoke and woo each girl on the town. Maybe the good tragedy to come back out of that is that we’re solely now studying that his potential was left unfulfilled for thus lengthy.