In our “For Your Consideration” column, MTC editors, writers, and readers point your attention to works of art and cultural texts that may have dropped out of the 36-hour discourse cycle, but we consider worthy of your attention and consideration. In this inaugural feature, Amanda Ann Klein and Olivia Stowell discuss Aaron Schimberg’s 2024 film A Different Man, a psychological drama about an actor with facial differences who undergoes an experimental treatment to alter his appearance, starring Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, and Renate Reinseve.
Olivia Stowell: Has the glow-up bubble burst? Between The Substance and A Different Man, last year offered up two different films with actor protagonists looking to magical/science-fictional “fixes” to remedy the ways they don’t conform to beauty standards. In both cases, the glow-up isn’t quite what it cracked up to be. While I appreciated both films, I especially loved A Different Man—its totally committed performances, its visual style’s evocation of the 70s, its refusal to say anything neat or tidy about what it means to live with disability and difference. I was really excited to see that you share my love for this film! What about it spoke to you?
Amanda Ann Klein: It sounds cliched to state this, but in a film environment where so many theatrical releases are remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels or Star Wars-adjacent, it’s refreshing and exciting to see such a weird, little film. I went into it knowing nothing, which again, is a rare experience these days since we always know the basic plots of our IP-centered entertainment, and was carried from moment to moment, always feeling surprised. When Oswald (Adam Pearson) walks on screen, with his infectious swagger and good humor, he completely shifts the movie. Instead of feeling happy for Edward/Guy (Sebastian Stan), his medical miracle, and his new life, we realize he is truly a pathetic figure, and always will be. It happens in a split second, and it’s a wonderful thing to experience as a viewer.
The film is also visually interesting. It’s shot on 16 mm, which is incredibly rare in 2024, making it all the more significant to the film’s overall tone, a grainier, lived-in look that matches Edward/Guy’s experience of the world. And as you note, 16 mm also recalls a different era of filmmaking, when American cinema was taking more and more risks, and offering characters who make us feel unsettled and sad.
There is obviously also much to be said about this film’s representation of individuals with physical disabilities, specifically facial differences, but I’ll pause here for now.
OS: I totally agree about this being a rare surprise! At no moment did I feel like I knew where the narrative would go next. It also felt, to me, like a film populated with people, not mouthpieces parroting Twitter hot-takes or symbols for mechanisms of plot. Edward/Guy isn’t a pity-story of disability; he’s a pathetic figure unable to overcome his own self-perceptions. Oswald isn’t just this aspirational, saintly disabled figure; he’s charismatic, selfish, swaggering. Renata Reinsve’s Ingrid isn’t just a manic pixie dream girl object of desire; she’s kind of an asshole (and possibly a fetishist?).
And I think that part of it—the unpredictability and ultimate unknowability of the characters’ interactions and desires, their subjectivities—supports the film’s particular approach to representation as well. How does the triangle between Edward/Guy, Oswald, and Ingrid interplay with what the film is saying about disability for you?
AAK: On its surface A Different Man presents itself as a movie about disability and how physical differences impact the way we move through the world and how we see ourselves. We witness Edward/Guy finally achieve everything he thought he wanted in life: a “normal” face, an exciting job, coworkers who hang on his every word, and a gorgeous girlfriend. He even lands the lead role in a play. Then Edward/Guy meets Oswald and cannot understand how this man–who was born with the same rare disability–has managed to become a charming ladies man who gets everything he wants in life: the friends, the lead role, and Ingrid. He did it all with the same face Edward/Guy spent his life hating, and also blaming for his misery.
Based on this plot summary, it is tempting to read the film as a lesson on how self-acceptance and self-love are all it takes to live a happy life. Edward/Guy’s disability was never about how he looked to others, but how he saw himself. As every self-help TikTok video has proclaimed, “If you don’t love yourself, how can anyone else?”
Upon rewatching the film, I realized that Edward/Guy and Oswald’s facial differences are, in many ways, the MacGuffin of A Different Man. While they certainly set the plot in motion and allow Edward/Guy to meet Ingrid and Oswald, it is ultimately unimportant. Edward/Guy feels exactly the same before and after his facial surgery,
A Different Man, to me at least, is about loneliness and the seeming impossibility of finding–and keeping–happiness. Edward/Guy thought a new face, a new name, and a new career–that is, becoming a “different man”–would make him happy. But happiness is always just out of reach, not just for him but for all of the characters. Even though Ingrid and Oswald’s apparent domestic bliss serves to further highlight Edward/Guy’s inability to connect with people, the couple is always on the hunt for more excitement, such as their decision to move to a nudist commune for group sex, and the audience is left with the sense that, like Edward/Guy, they will never be truly content with life. A Different Man is not about a rare facial condition; it is about human alienation and the impossibility of ever being truly “happy.”
Despite its grimy realist aesthetics and grim read on humanity, A Different Man is not a depressing movie. For me its representation of humanity was comforting in its honesty and recognizability. Many of us spend our lives wondering if we will ever be happy or what we might do to make ourselves happy, and that search can be demoralizing. A Different Man tells us that being dissatisfied, longing for what we do not yet have, is a defining human experience.
OS: I love your framing of facial differences as a “MacGuffin” for this film. Part of what I admire so much about Stan’s performance in this film is that he maintains this perfect, paradoxical continuity. For me, as “Edward,” his vulnerability felt almost painful to watch; as “Guy,” he feels exactly the same, but there’s something almost curdled about Stan’s performance. Perhaps what I’m trying to get at is that by the film’s third act, Stan’s handsomeness has even seemed to recede somehow. This sense of a curdled masculinity seems to be something Stan is interested in exploring in his career right now, between A Different Man and The Apprentice.
AAK: I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right about the resonances between those two performances. In A Different Man and in The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan is playing men who achieve a lifelong dream, whether it’s a handsome face or a real estate deal, and still end up feeling dissatisfied or even completely numb. These characters are two different outcomes of our current “Crisis of Masculinity.” In A Different Man, Edward/Guy progressively directs his disappointment inward, receding from meaningful human interaction and his understanding of his masculinity. In The Apprentice, Donald directs his disappointment outward, grabbing and taking more and more in the hopes that he will eventually have his fill and finally feel like a real man. One character chooses loneliness while the other chooses vengeance.
Amanda Ann Klein is Professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University. Her primary research and teaching interests include film history and historiography, film genres and genre theory, exploitation films, reality television and television studies, and subcultural studies. She is the author of Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming and American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures.
Olivia Stowell is the TV & Film editor for MTC. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, where her dissertation project examines race, gender, and labor in contemporary reality TV.