Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label A Different Man

A Different Man: a discomfiting but darkly hilarious story of a man with two faces

Aaron Simberg's "A Different Man," a disturbing but darkly funny tale of a man with two faces, one soul and zero games, takes a while to bring up the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. But once it does, it's a poignant reminder that simplistic ideas about the relationship between physical beauty and virtue are instilled in us at an early age and then remain largely undeveloped. Simberg's evil, abhorrent act of ethical blackmail isn't the first film to turn these ideas upside down. But he's one of the first to turn it upside down again, and then a time or two more, until by the end you may be looking in the same direction you started, only now feeling dizzy. Edward (Sebastian Stan in heavy prosthetics) is a man with neurofibromatosis, a disease that causes tumors to form on the face, severely disfiguring facial features. He's an actor who only appears in cheesy image videos that give employees advice on how to behave around disabled coworkers. "Invit...