A Different Man review: This dark comedy would make for a great double bill with The Substance

The story within the story in A Different Man feels awfully familiar. Playwright Ingrid (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve) was once neighbours with a man named Edward. He had neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that can cause benign tumours around the face. He was kind, if a little reserved. Then he was gone. Dead by suicide, she was told. So, she writes a play about the two of them in his honour, in which she characterises herself as a kind of benevolent manic pixie dream girl, and him as tragically naive as possible.

She casts a man without facial differences in the role, who calls himself Guy. He’s played by Hollywood dreamboat, Sebastian Stan. Guy insists that he’s right for the role, that he can bring something essential to it. Stage makeup can achieve the rest. But here’s the kicker of writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s dark, chaotic, and tautly composed comedy: Guy used to be Edward, the man with neurofibromatosis. An experimental drug turned his tumours into putty, and he renamed himself Guy, while spreading rumours about the death of his old self.

A Different Man layers idea onto idea, then inflates them to the point of satirical absurdity. Edward navigates a world assaulted on all sides by its own cataclysmic soundscape, where doctors’ faces are plastered with sociopathic, skeletal grins. Ingrid is convinced she’s doing the good work of representation. She’s pinned up historical medical documents and photos in a wall collage, yet seems grotesquely incapable of describing her work without using the words “Beauty and the Beast”. Edward-as-Guy tries to confront her: “How do you know he hasn’t had any experience?”

But the arrival of Oswald (Adam Pearson) creates a shift. Oswald is all that Edward is not: charismatic, self-possessed, and entirely unfazed by Ingrid’s provocations, possibly because he knows he shares nothing in common with her protagonist beyond a genetic condition.

Pearson is an actor with neurofibromatosis, who made his debut in Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 sci-fi Under the Skin, and went on to collaborate with Schimberg on the somewhat thematically linked 2019 film Chained for Life, which satirised the film industry. The dynamic he and Stan create here is barbed, but rich with ideas. To make its basic point, the non-disabled view of the disabled experience is frequently ludicrous, identities are not monoliths, and neither do they represent a singular emotional mindset. Pearson commandeers the frame, possessing an immaculate British cordiality, of the intellectual who never takes himself all too seriously.

Stan, meanwhile, in a career-best turn, amplifies the desperate losing streak of his previous career-best turn in the 2017 biopic I, Tonya, trading (most of) its cruelty for slow-burn disassociation. Edward is bitter over the fact Oswald isn’t as defeated as he is. Even when his appearance is transformed, he can’t instantly shake off the slumped posture and mumbled sentences of a man determined to take up as little space as possible.

A Different Man occupies a surprisingly similar space to Coralie Fargeat’s recent body horror, The Substance. Both are about how the world’s intolerances will shape a person’s relationship with themselves, but that it’s the relationship with the self that has the true capability to destroy.

Dir: Aaron Schimberg. Starring: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, C Mason Wells, Owen Kline, Charlie Korsmo, Patrick Wang . 15, 112 mins.

‘A Different Man’ is in cinemas from 4 October