Tuesday, July 8, 2025

A Different Man (2024)

IMDb plot summary: An aspiring actor undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance, but his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare.
Directed by Aaron Schimberg. Stars Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, and Adam Pearson.

A Different Man follows the story of an actor with significant facial deformity who is given the chance to take an experimental treatment to make him look "normal," and he decides to go for it and then build himself an entirely new life once it's successful. What a strange and fascinating movie this is. It's well-written and intriguing on a narrative level alone, but as an exploration of disability and disfiguration and identity, it's even better. The writer/director has a bilateral cleft palate and casts disfigured actor Adam Pearson in this (as well as apparently a previous film of his I'll have to check out), and that totally tracks -- it FEELS like a story about visible disability from someone who's lived it. There's also a great amount of psychological horror in here, but in a very unexpected way. Overall, it's well worth seeing, and I'm definitely going to have to look up this writer/director's other films.

How it entered my Flickchart:
A Different Man (2024)
beat Blackmail Is My Life (#1990 → #1992)
beat Dreams (#993 → #998)
lost to Short Term 12 (#497 → #499)
lost to Theater Camp (#745 → #743)
lost to Sisters (#869 → #866)
beat Robin Hood (#931 → #964)
beat The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (#900 → #902)
beat The Farewell (#884 → #897)
beat The Graduate (#876 → #882)
lost to Evil (#872 → #742)
beat The Hateful Eight (#874 → #879)
beat Spellbound (#873 → #877)
Ranked #864/3984 on my Flickchart. Flickscore™: 78.

No comments: