Film Assessment: Provocative, genre-bending ‘A Totally different Man’ will get underneath our pores and skin in surprising methods

Think about you could possibly get up one morning, stand on the mirror, and actually peel off any a part of your appears to be like you don’t like — with solely movie-star magnificence remaining.

How wouldn’t it change your life? How SHOULD it change your life?

That is a query – effectively, a launching level, actually — for Edward, protagonist of Aaron Schimberg’s fascinating, genre-bending, undeniably provocative and sometimes irritating “A Totally different Man,” that includes a stellar trio of Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve.

The very title is open to a number of interpretations. Who (and what) is “completely different”? The unique Edward, who has neurofibromatosis, a genetic dysfunction that causes bulging tumors on his face? Or the person he turns into when he’s in a position to slip out of that pores and skin? And is he “completely different” to others, or to himself?

Once we meet Edward, a struggling actor in New York (Stan, in elaborate make-up), he’s filming some kind of industrial. We quickly study it’s an educational video on the way to behave round colleagues with deformities. However even there, the director stops him, providing modifications. “Wouldn’t need to scare anybody,” he says.

On Edward’s means house on the subway, folks stare. Again at his small house constructing, he meets a younger lady within the hallway, within the midst of transferring to the flat subsequent door. She winces visibly when she first sees him, as just about everybody does.

However later, Ingrid (Reinsve) tries to make it as much as him, coming over to speak. She is charming and forthright, and tells Edward she’s a budding playwright.

Edward goes for a medical checkup and learns that one in all his tumors is slowly progressing over the attention. However he is additionally informed of an experimental trial he might be a part of. With the chance — possibly — of a treatment.

So Edward, spurred at the very least partly by frustration at not with the ability to get nearer to Ingrid, joins the trial. These scenes tackle the sudden really feel of a sci-fi fantasy movie — not awkwardly, however by some means fairly easily shifting genres for a bit.

As for the remedy, it begins working even earlier than anybody had hoped. Quickly, Edward’s pores and skin is beginning to come off in clumps. It is terrifying. After which he finds himself on the mirror, disintegrating earlier than his eyes. However immediately, Edward appears to be like like — effectively, he appears to be like like Sebastian Stan.

Naturally, life modifications, and radically. When he goes again to the identical bar wherein he’d been stared at and left alone, he turns into everybody’s buddy. A lady even needs to have intercourse with him within the lavatory. He catches his personal eye within the mirror, as if to say: “What’s taking place to us?”

Edward now makes a momentous alternative. He merely disappears from his former life and turns into a “completely different” individual completely. Now his title is Man, and he lives in a nicer place. He additionally has a job as an actual property agent — the final word face-forward profession, making use of his silky attractiveness.

However Man will not be, let’s consider, comfy in his personal pores and skin. Then in the future, he sees Ingrid strolling right into a theater. She’s holding auditions for the play she’s written — a few man identical to Edward. Actually, it IS about Edward. And he turns into obsessive about taking part in the position.

In the middle of auditions, Edward runs into one other actor with deformities who says, poignantly, “I used to be born to play this.” Man in fact can not say why he disagrees — which is that HE is Edward. Right here Schimberg is tapping into the thorny dialogue over casting, and whether or not disabled roles ought to solely be stuffed by disabled actors, trans roles by trans actors, and so forth. Including layers of complexity to his movie, Schimberg does each, in a means.

Or ought to we are saying, Ingrid does each. As playwright — and right here, the excellent Reinsve acquires an edge that her preliminary, sweeter incarnation of Ingrid lacked — she appears to know instinctively that Man, regardless of his dashing appears to be like, has a connection to the character. She even lets him strive rehearsing with a masks of his earlier self.

Enter Oswald.

It’s disgrace we are able to’t say an excessive amount of about Oswald with out veering into spoiler territory, as a result of Oswald (Pearson) is the indispensable a part of the final act right here. Oswald is (as is Pearson) an actor who has neurofibromatosis, however in all different methods he is extraordinarily completely different from Edward. He is outgoing, partaking, brimming with easy wit — British, too — and interacts with the world in methods Edward might solely have dreamed of.

Clearly, this may throw Edward/Man for a loop. Early scenes exploring the dynamics of this unlikely trio crackle with chance, discomfort, generally comedy, generally tragedy.

What’s Schimberg finally making an attempt to say? Right here’s the place it will get tough. He throws out some tantalizing questions on authenticity in life and artwork, to not point out how the way in which we glance charts our future. Then, he doesn’t a lot reply them as shock us with head-spinning developments that really feel, even for these wholly distinctive circumstances, as if they arrive out of nowhere.

But it surely’s an absorbing experience, and Schimberg works with confidence and brio. On high of that his solid is so darned good, you need the story to go on and on — how a few trilogy, with everybody returning for sequels primarily based on Oswald and Ingrid?

“A Totally different Man,” an A24 launch, has been rated R by the Movement Image Affiliation “for sexual content material, graphic nudity, language and a few violent content material.” Operating time: 112 minutes. Three stars out of 4.