For God’s Sake, Let’s Talk About a Different Movie
For months, cinephiles have claimed to find substance in a certain body-horror movie. I am politely asking you to look elsewhere.
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About 40 minutes into A Different Man, the face of Edward Lemuel, the striving actor played with wounded insecurity by Sebastian Stan, begins to fall off in reddened, meaty chunks.
Edward is a man with neurofibromatosis, which manifests most noticeably as tumors on his cheeks, forehead, and chin. In public, he is vigilant, picking apart the ways people gaze upon or ignore him, viewing himself from the outside like a passenger in his own story. In more private moments, he is awkward, needy, and hopeful, like in interactions with the burgeoning playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), who moves in next door. When he opts to participate in a drug trial whose clinicians market it as a cure, he accepts a cast of his face as a premature token of remembrance for when the drug proves efficacious. His is a kind of pathetic that inspires neither scorn nor pity, but a universal, sorrowful connection — his yearning for a different face is a consideration of what makes a human being legible and thus able to be understood, known, even loved. That Edward is a struggling actor only renders this consideration more acute.
As Edward’s fretting hands peel off the wet and bleeding parts of his post-trial face, the body horror is shown primarily in the darkened glass of a framed photograph. The chunks drop into his hands and he lets out gasps, and in each breath, Edward is reborn. The slim montage of transformation continues over the next three minutes, and a rhythm locks in place. He stumbles into his bathroom with a white undershirt stained with blood. He looks at himself with awe and confusion, observing whatever pockmarks and roughness still remain. His face itself is a liminal space: not quite who he once was, but certainly not who he will end up being. In the meantime, he spends evenings looking at Ingrid through his door’s peephole and eating microwavable dinners on the kitchen floor while inane whistle tutorial videos echo in his dingy apartment. Until one day, he closes the mirrored cabinet in his bathroom and confronts the face of a fully transfigured man.
Edward tentatively explores the city by foot with his new face. Shot from behind as he moves through the candy-colored lights of nighttime New York, his shoulders are hunched. He’s still on guard. When he sees his own reflection, he stands straighter. Marvels at himself. Is this what beauty feels like? The ability to take up more space without question? To look at yourself and not wince? As he spends more time with his handsome face, Edward decides to metaphorically kill his former self, taking on the new name of Guy — telling one of the doctors from the clinical trial who comes by his apartment that Edward is “really, really dead.”
Guy is a cutthroat Realtor with a spacious apartment who infiltrates new pools of society, auditions for the play Ingrid has written about her former neighbor (she doesn’t recognize Guy and Edward as the same man in ways that become increasingly hilarious and galling), and gets cast. That’s when a figure disrupts the new stasis of Guy’s life: Oswald, a charismatic Brit with neurofibromatosis, whose face is an echo of what Edward’s once looked like. But Oswald has none of the baggage Edward continues to heave around and is embodied with wit and charm by actor Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg spins a darkly comedic, profoundly existential, and gimlet-eyed film from this narrative setup, with Oswald eventually weaving himself intimately into Ingrid’s play, her life, and Guy’s imagined future.
When I first watched A Different Man, my mind immediately turned to The Substance. The Coralie Fargeat–directed body-horror onslaught is pure blunt-force trauma, a cocktail that is one part fairy tale, two parts hagsploitation, focusing on a woman named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former Oscar-winning actress who hosted an aerobics morning show for decades before getting unceremoniously fired for the sin of turning 50. That’s when she’s introduced to an underground product that offers people a way to recapture their youth and become “simply a better version” of themselves.
One of the biggest sins of this Oscar season is that critics and audiences are projecting upon a certain movie a substance it doesn’t actually have.
Elisabeth injects herself with a neon-green liquid, only for a younger, prettier version of herself to be birthed bloodily from her back in the form of Sue (Margaret Qualley). They must switch places every seven days to maintain the balance of their dual existence; one body remains conscious, the other unconscious, spinal fluid crassly transferred from Elisabeth to Sue for stabilization. As Sue rockets into the stratosphere of fame, auditioning for and nabbing Elisabeth’s old role, the older woman watches from the sidelines as the younger one disregards their time limitations and forces Elisabeth to age into a cartoonish elder so grotesque the characterization dovetails into cruelty.
These movies do not invite neat one-to-one comparisons, but The Substance and A Different Man — released last year within a few months of each other — are two films inadvertently in conversation. They play with similar thematic terrain: doppelgängers, the body, disability, self-loathing, misguided desire, nihilism bred from consistently looking outside yourself for a definition of who you are. Both won awards when they premiered at film festivals; Stan earned the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at Sundance, Fargeat got the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. Both lead actors won Golden Globes for their work, giving committed performances set in hyperstylized worlds (the former existing in a fun-house, ’80s-inflected version of Hollywood inhabited by hopeless image-obsessed women; the latter in the conniving, parasitic world of New York theater).
Moore and Stan have also been nominated for Academy Awards, though Stan is being recognized as a Best Actor nominee for his far less impressive work in The Apprentice. (That Pearson wasn’t nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category is a discussion for another time.) In the public eye, The Substance is the comeback contender that could earn Moore what many perceive to be an overdue accolade. Yet it’s only A Different Man (nominated only for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and up against The Substance in that category) that has anything meaningful to say. One of the biggest sins of this Oscar season is that critics and audiences are projecting upon Fargeat’s movie a substance it doesn’t actually have.
Where The Substance is unrelentingly direct, A Different Man is deliberately slippery. Where The Substance’s camp is too enamored with itself, causing it to trip into self-seriousness, A Different Man has genuine pitch-black humor wrung from discomfort and angst. Where The Substance is engaged in surfaces, bolstered by tremendous prosthetic work and special effects, A Different Man plunges into the murky depths of its characters, rendering the fallout of its lead character’s transformation as far more subterranean. Moore appears in mirror scenes not unlike the ones that occur in A Different Man, though in Fargeat’s the camera pores over Moore’s every feathery wrinkle, every ripple of flesh under harsh bright-white light. Let’s keep it buck; Demi Moore looks amazing at 62 years old thanks to all the privileges at her fingertips. But the camera sneers at her, creating a distancing effect that undermines the complexity of Moore’s performance. For all the film’s interest in the body, it has a remarkable lack of intimacy. The closer the camera gets to a legible face, the less you see of a soul.
Meanwhile, A Different Man’s camera treats the body’s appearance and movements as the richest way to connect. The body is still a site of horror, as the single sequence of Edward’s transformation implies. But more crucially, the body is rendered as a consistently fraught site on which identity is fomented and complicated, turning Schimberg’s film into a slyly constructed and powerfully caustic doppelgänger tale. Late in the film, Edward finds himself at a karaoke spot with Oswald. Against a backdrop of glittering red tinsel, Oswald performs a rendition of “I Wanna Get Next to You,” by Rose Royce. While everyone vibes to Oswald’s crooning, Edward’s face is masked with confusion. His eyes jut around, searching for a truth with which he can’t come to terms. In real time, through Stan’s pellucid physical performance, the audience experiences Edward coming to an understanding of the gulf of experience standing between him and Oswald. Edward has everything people have been culturally told in this country to desire: money, a social life, sex. But none of these gives him meaning or pleasure. It’s as if his own truest desires remain incomprehensible.
Meanwhile, Oswald lives a capacious life in spite of the very disorder Edward believed doomed him. Pearson plays Oswald with a light-on-his-feet charisma that becomes a stunning counterpoint to the heavy sorrow of Stan’s performance. It’s the most revelatory decision in the film, allowing Schimberg to bypass simplistic moralism about disability. The further Oswald encroaches upon Edward’s new existence, eventually swooping into the role Edward was meant to play on Ingrid’s stage and ultimately disrupting his romantic relationship with her, the more it dawns on Edward that his problem wasn’t his face but something more tricksy.
By contrast, there is no real pleasure in existing within any body in The Substance. Even when Sue, jejune and perfectly calibrated to modern beauty standards, stumbles onto her feet after tearing through Elisabeth’s back, she admires herself the way the camera does: with a leering quality, reflecting a hunger with no end. The visual language of The Substance is rendered in the machinations of gleaming advertisements meant to trade upon the fears embedded in women by a culture that argues death is preferable to aging. Fargeat adopts the dehumanizing gaze of 2000s beer advertisements or modern porn to heighten the exploitation of Sue’s dewy skin and taut figure, her eyes gliding over her own flesh, drinking herself in. Where the film sees abjection in Elisabeth’s body, it sees endless possibility in Sue’s.
But these possibilities are a closed circuit. All Sue desires is more. More youth, more beauty, more fame. That those possibilities curdle into exploitation is a result of Elisabeth’s own making. The film roots women’s problems not in the patriarchy that ushers them into single-minded desires, but in their choice to remain young — as if they really have a choice. Ads like Carl’s Jr.’s are unsubtle seductions, but what is The Substance trying to seduce its viewers into experiencing and considering otherwise? These aren’t characters but containers for derision.
Schimberg’s characterization looks outward as much as, if not more than, inward. His work here demonstrates a remarkable interest in the ways the ideas we hold of ourselves clash into the reality of other people. His direction, the script, and Reinsve’s performance in particular explore the extractive ways of artists who worm their way into the lives of others and steal meaning for material. While having sex one night in the hushed darkness of her apartment, Ingrid asks, “You have the mask? Put it on,” referring to the cast of his face taken by the clinical doctors before he was “cured” of neurofibromatosis, which he used to audition for Ingrid’s play. Edward balks, “Why?” “Just do what I tell you,” her tone harsh enough to bruise. Edward tentatively goes into another room and returns naked save for the mask entrapping his face. When they start having sex again, Ingrid erupts in laughter. “This is so fucked-up. You look ridiculous!”
Scenes such as this reveal A Different Man to be the best kind of doppelgänger story — each figure brought to life in tight performances, offering enclosed, fully realized emotional and psychic realms. Stan often wears a strained, venomous smile when around Oswald, but the only person it’s poisoning is himself. You’re constantly waiting for him to succumb. And he does. After losing the role in Ingrid’s production — which goes on to find great success with Oswald in the lead — he crashes a performance, wearing the mask of his old face. His attempt to strangle Oswald leads a large prop door hanging above the stage to fall and crush Edward’s limbs, which are henceforth contained in thick casts. Oswald and a now-pregnant Ingrid handle Edward’s care, with his anger and dejection only growing. After his in-house physical therapist makes a remark about how the hell Oswald got with Ingrid, Edward snaps, stabbing the physical therapist and killing him in a sloppy fight in the kitchen.
The Substance ends in an even more violent fashion: a parade of blood and viscera involving Elisabeth’s fully deformed body and the consequences of Sue using the substance on herself. The finale recalls Brian Yuzna’s 1989 flick Society; The Substance is nothing if not committedly referential, though it never quite synthesizes its inspirations to give us new language in the forever fraught conversations around women and aging, or even what horror can do as a genre. After all, bodies in The Substance aren’t venues for truth but obfuscation, suffering, and self-loathing. Every body in Fargeat’s film is a hall of mirrors caving in on itself. When you take a look at the shards, it’s clear they’re reflecting nothing at all.
A Different Man has a coda to the violence Edward impulsively remakes his life with. Edward, out of prison, much older and graying, runs into Oswald — or, more accurate to their dynamic, Oswald runs into him. They decide to have dinner at an upscale sushi restaurant with Ingrid by Oswald’s side. “I’ve achieved everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m ready for the next phase,” Ingrid says about her decision to retire as a famed playwright and move with Oswald to a nude commune in Canada. Oswald calls Edward by his real name, confirming that his arrest would have finally outed the true identity of Guy. “Oh, my old friend, you haven’t changed a bit,” Oswald says, as Edward’s face fills the screen, Stan’s tight smile and gaze directed at the camera. Edward is paralyzed by the realization that shedding your skin, your name, and your history isn’t transformation but a futile disavowal. Written upon the bodies of the characters in both these films is a story their respective filmmakers obsess over, but only A Different Man understands that there’s narrative potential under the skin.
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