Where David Cronenberg’s body horrors of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Videodrome, The Fly, and Crash, were fascinating because of the fusion of technology and the human form, a new wave of genre films is anxiously asking: how much can we tweak and tinker before our bodies start to bite back? Like Theseus’s ship, how much can we swap out before nothing of our true self remains? Cosmetic surgery is booming in the 2020s, promoted via social media and normalised across every age group, so it is no wonder that a new generation of filmmakers have bodily modification on the brain. This month alone, we have been treated to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, an impressively gross parable about ageing and sexism, and now we have Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, both funnier and thornier in its reflexive layers of insight around identity, authorship, and entertainment.

We first meet aspiring actor Edward (Sebastian Stan, terrific throughout) playing a thankless bit part in a corporate empathy training video about ‘facially different co-workers’. Edward lives with neurofibromatosis, a disfiguring condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on his face and makes him a magnet for the gawking attention of strangers. Edward is constantly stopped in the street, stared at on the subway, and approached by people who eerily claim that they have seen him somewhere before.

The outside world seems much more interested in Edward than he is in it; he mostly keeps to himself, living alone in his flat and shuffling around a scuzzy version of New York City that feels like one in which the broken windows policy never came into effect – one where you will find cockroaches floating in your coffee and drowned rats dropping from the ceiling of your apartment. Schimberg, cinematographer Wyatt Garfield and production designer Anna Kathleen steep this world in deep browns, russets, and mustards, while Umberto Smerilli’s woozy, clarinet-driven score perfectly complements the film’s mournful, autumnal palette.

After befriending his new neighbour, the nosy but bewitching playwright Ingrid (a delightfully anarchic Renate Reinsve), Edward agrees to join an experimental drug trial in the hope of curing his condition for good. Some of the doctors at the clinic avert their eyes at the sight of him, while others mollycoddle and patronise him as they marvel at the drug’s early results. When Edward complains that tumours have begun to fall off his face in large clumps, his physician replies soothingly, ‘I’m sure they only look like clumps to you.’

But fall away they do. Mike Marino’s exceptional special effects make-up allows for a truly grisly metamorphosis, after which Edward looks in the mirror and sees the Sebastian Stan audiences will recognise from the Avengers movies, chisel-jawed and handsome, albeit with the same loping gait and nervous disposition that Edward has developed over a lifetime of specimenhood. He promptly abandons his old life, tells his landlord that Edward has died by suicide, adopts the name ‘Guy Moratz’, and hones in on the most generically successful life imaginable: that of a real estate agent, respected by his peers and lucky with the ladies. But after a chance encounter with Ingrid, who naturally doesn’t recognise her old neighbour, Edward discovers that she is preparing to mount a new off-Broadway play titled Edward – a play about him. In achieving his ideal physical form, Edward may have written himself out of the part he was born to play.

For the first hour of A Different Man, you might worry that Schimberg is preparing some rote Cyrano retelling, a pat ‘careful what you wish for’ allegory, or worse, a reductive thesis on how we should all just learn to accept ourselves unconditionally for who we are. In the second half, Schimberg’s sly and scathingly funny film becomes less about reinvention and more about representation, a dark fairy tale that could only exist in the 2020s – a time when lived experience (particularly of the traumatic variety) is the highest currency in art and the only thing more important than beauty is authenticity.

The more Schimberg’s script mires itself in identity politics, the funnier it gets. Look at Ingrid: a free-spirited narcissist prone to moral one-eighties whenever it suits her and her play’s agenda. When Edward (as Guy) suggests that he could play the part of the fictional Edward wearing a mask modelled from his old deformities – secretly play-acting as his own past self and re-assuming the condition he strove to overcome – Ingrid rationalises his ‘cripping up’ with a brilliant bit of twenty-first century double-think: wouldn’t it, in fact, be more offensive to cast someone with a facial difference simply because of their condition? Wouldn’t that be ‘exploitative, even?’

Ingrid is destined to change her mind when Oswald (Adam Pearson, star of Schimberg’s 2018 film Chained for Life) appears unannounced at rehearsals, like a Dickensian ghost of Edward’s past. Oswald also has neurofibromatosis (as does Pearson), but functions as a caricature of everything Edward never was: he is confident, garrulous, flirtatious, and effortlessly talented at everything he puts his mind to (saxophone, yoga, and jiu jitsu, to name a few). His very being suggests to Edward that if it wasn’t his deformity holding him back in his previous life, it must have been some other, even deeper defect – something no pill or procedure could ever fix. Surely this is the latent dread of plastic surgery patients everywhere.

Is it worse to be ugly and interesting or handsome and boring? Edward makes for such a compelling and tragic figure because he wants to have it both ways (don’t we all?); he wants to improve his lot in life through physical transformation whilst retaining what once made him so unique. But our current age of Botox, Ozempic, lip fillers, tummy tucks, buccal fat removal, and Brazilian butt lifts runs counter to the age of autofiction. You can look perfect or you can live truthfully – A Different Man suggests that you cannot do both.

A Different Man (Kismet) is released nationally on 24 October 2024.