Writer-director Aaron Schimberg has created a diverting, if contrived, noir satire-parable about the faces we prepare to meet the faces that we meet. I’m not sure that, finally, it says as much as it thinks it’s saying, and I’m also not sure if the resemblance to early Woody Allen is intentional or not. But it is arresting and challenging with an exhilarating performance from Adam Pearson, from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and whom Schimberg has in fact already directed in his previous feature Chained For Life.
The setting is a dark and dingy New York City, where Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a would-be actor with a craniofacial condition who so far has only got work in an instructional video for corporations about how to treat co-workers with craniofacial conditions. Poor Edward is shy and nervous (his neighbour says he’s like Woody Allen) and Reinate Reinsve has the Annie Hall role as Ingrid, the quirky-beautiful next-door neighbour who is kind to him.
When Edward has pioneering surgery transforming him into a conventionally handsome guy, his life is turned around and he passes himself off as someone else, but when he hears Ingrid is writing a play about their friendship, he insists on starring in it, wearing a mask of his old face. The arrival of Oswald (Adam Pearson) changes things: a dapper, witty, confident British guy with precisely the same (untransformed) facial condition who professes himself a massive fan of Ingrid’s creative process and has no interest in surgery. With his sheer confidence and happiness, Oswald becomes a doppelgänger threat to Edward.
The tangled oddity of the story makes as many demands on an audience’s attention and credulity as anything else on screen – although the way Schimberg’s film refuses the horror tropes that another might embrace is interesting. Pearson himself moves through the film with more unselfconscious lightness than any other character: he is allowed to be garrulous and effusive in a way absolutely denied to everyone else - and the effect is dreamlike and unreal but bold too. It’s a film whose tone and meaning can’t be nailed down.
• A Different Man screened at the Berlin film festival.
