Last week saw the release of The Substance, a black horror comedy about fame, beauty standards, vanity, and identity. This week brings us A Different Man, a black comedy that also touches on vanity and identity, but this time the story centers on a male actor, not a woman.
Sebastian Stan stars as Edward, a struggling actor in New York city. He has neurofibromatosis, which causes extreme facial deformity, so his roles are relegated to things like industrial training films about how to handle tricky situations with disabled coworkers. He lives in a dilapidated apartment with a leaky ceiling, and is in love with his friendly and perky playwright neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World). When he's approached to partake in a drug trial that may cure his disease, he agrees. The drug works, though the transformation is not pleasant (and is pretty gruesome to watch).
The second half of the movie finds Edward now living a "normal" life, working as a hot shot real estate agent. But his past comes back in the form of Ingrid, now producing her play, and Oswald (Adam Pearson of Under the Skin) a happy and popular man with the same facial deformities that once plagued Edward.
While Stan's facial deformities are the creation of talented makeup artists, Adam Pearson actually does have neurofibromatosis. For both of them, facial movements are limited, and their eyes are partially obscured, yet both are able to give truly memorable performances despite these limitations.
Stan's pre-transformed Edward is slouched and nebbish, clearly trying his best to remain as invisible as possible, but he also exudes a shy charm that his neighbor Ingrid definitely finds herself drawn to. Stan is really, really good in this.
Pearson's Oswald is Edward's complete opposite. He's friendly and gregarious, always wearing something loud, and when he enters a room, he's the center of attention, not because people are horrified but because people are drawn to him.
This is something Edward cannot understand, and the film does some interesting things with his resulting crisis of confidence. It also does some things that are a little muddled, taking the plot near the end of the film in directions I wasn't completely on board with. Still, the performances by Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson more than make up for any faults of the plot.
The animated featured The Wild Robot is based on a series of children's books by Peter Brown, about a futuristic task robot who finds itself on a forest island devoid of humans after a container ship loses its cargo.
Lupita Nyong'o voices the robot "ROZZUM unit 7134," (eventually just "ROZ"), and damn, is there nothing this woman can't do? She's perfect, imbuing ROZ with both robotic imperatives and maternal warmth as she finds herself adopting an abandoned gosling she names Brightbill, accepting motherhood as another task to complete, teaching him to swim and to fly so that eventually he'll be able to leave.
The first 10 minutes of the film only feature the voice of ROZ, and I was wondering if it may end up being an entire movie of just a robot talking to animals that don't understand it, but the plot finds a way to work talking animals into the story, so we also get Pedro Pascal as a Fink the Fox, Catherine O'Hara as an opossum mom, and Mark Hamil as Thorn the grizzly bear.
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