Justin Chang reviews Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man,” starring Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson, and Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.
In “A Different Man,” a thrillingly mercurial third feature from the writer and director Aaron Schimberg, Sebastian Stan plays Edward Lemuel, a mild-mannered New Yorker with a genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis. With bulging tumors above the neck, he’s “facially different,” in the parlance of a workplace sensitivity-training video in which he appears as an actor. But little such sensitivity greets Edward in the real world.
But then, in the context of what Schimberg is trying to provoke—a dismantling of conventional standards of attractiveness—does Stan’s slippery triumph here count as a kind of failure? Remarkably, as the movie accelerates into wilder, bloodier terrain, these contradictions don’t tear it apart; they deepen it. Schimberg may have concocted a madly inventive thought experiment, but to say that “A Different Man” merely deconstructs itself would miss how completely and satisfyingly it comes together.
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