It’s about how you frame it. If you were given the opportunity to entirely (allegedly) change your life, would you take it? A drastic, 360-degree transformation, with what you would hope would be the promise of something better—but without the guarantee. Transformation is nothing without perception. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure; one man’s beauty is another man’s breakdown.

In A Different Man, writer-director Aaron Schimberg holds up a mirror to his own insecurities: Am I attractive enough? Interesting enough? How in the world can I get people to like me more? But those age-old questions are only the tip of the iceberg, mapping the literal transformation of a disfigured man (Sebastian Stan) with the kind of razor-sharp commentary and psychological analysis we’ve been rummaging around in the dirt for eons trying to attain.

The film, which earned Stan the Silver Bear for Best Actor at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, pits the mercurial Marvel star against Adam Pearson (a scene-stealer in Under the Skin), whom Schimberg had already worked with in his debut feature Chained for Life (for which Schimberg recalls he was accused of being “exploitative”). In A Different Man, Stan plays Edward, a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis (the same condition which Pearson has in real life) who finds little joy in anything. But after taking a nebulous medical treatment that cures his condition , he’s still not happy. And then he meets Oswald, a thriving, charismatic man with the very disfigurement that Edward (now going by Guy) thought his life was being ruined by. Where do you go from there?

“Every five minutes it feels like a completely different movie, yet the characters remain in total stasis,” Sam writes, while Justin notes that the film “fuses the neurosis inherent with living, and chasing success, within a contemporary metropolis with the anxiety of body dysmorphia in a way that never feels cheap, reliant on shock value or avoiding nuance.” Justin, and plenty more Letterboxd , mention Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance in conversation with Schimberg’s feature—some seeing the similarities (Crousee calls A Different Man “‘the substance’ but for boys”) with others drawing clear differences.

Ellis points out the specificities of male insecurity in Schimberg’s film, whereas Fargeat’s body horror specifically lights a match under the misogyny and demands of the beauty industry forced upon women. Here, man is his own worst enemy: “It gets at how weird male insecurity is because we’re not ‘supposed’ to be like that, but also we are, so it comes out in often weird, underhanded, depressing and funny ways.”

To dig into all those ways and more, Schimberg helps us trace the before, during and after of A Different Man’s pivotal transformation—what makes a mind do such a thing, how it feels, and how we all must deal with the consequences.

After their first collaboration on Chained for Life, in which Pearson plays a disfigured actor that his co-star just can’t connect with, Schimberg knew he still hadn’t shown off Adam’s full range.

“It was very hard to just make a movie about a positive disfigured person, because people don’t necessarily understand that, or they might not believe it,” Schimberg says, before anticipating an audience’s impatience, and their questions. “What about the discrimination he faces? If it doesn’t bother him, why not? Is it because he’s stupid?”

As a result, before we reached Oswald, there had to be someone else. “Edward is a more classic version of what we think of as the disfigured character—the way that you internalize that trauma, and the way it damages him for life,” Schimberg says of Sebastian Stan’s character, a glum actor who takes no care of himself because he’s convinced he could never deserve it. Schimberg sees it all as a hall of mirrors: “The way that we judge others is the way that we view ourselves: for half of the movie, Edward is looking at Oswald and thinking about himself. He’s thinking about his disfigurement, but it’s also a way of thinking about how other people look at disfigurement. They’re looking at somebody who’s disfigured who’s thriving, and they don’t know how they feel about it. Is this fair? Is this person really thriving? Does this person deserve to thrive? Are they taking something from me? How come this woman loves him and not me, when I’m more attractive?”

What leads to Edward’s transformation is pretty simple, in what Wesley calls “an absolutely riveting character study of a man coming to with how limited his charm actually is.” But he doesn’t know that yet. All he knows is himself, and what he’s convinced he must get rid of.

After

Although Edward’s transformation was borne out of his own obsession with nobody other than himself, things unspool in more complex ways after the procedure because of two other people: Oswald, who we know intimately, and, perhaps most perniciously, Ingrid (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve)—Edward’s next-door neighbor, then friend, then whatever the opposite of a muse is, then director, then lover, then ex-lover, then who knows what else.

Ingrid moves in, asks to borrow laundry detergent, does not flinch at Edward’s condition pre-transformation, but does get a little too close. “I knew there was something odd about Ingrid the second she wanted to squeeze his blackhead so early in the game,” Zopinion writes. She is also the character that separates this film from something like The Substance: a woman taking advantage of physical difference, using another person’s life for her own ego, vanity, art, call it what you will. With every justification, she gives about turning Edward’s life pre-transformation into a stage production (she thinks he took his own life, as he re-enters hers as fresh-out-the-box realtor Guy), the ramifications of her actions become greater. Ableism and exploitation don’t seem to care about gender. In other words, as Hudson writes, “still the worst person in the world.”

“When I wrote the part of Ingrid, I was unsure that anybody could pull this off,” Schimberg says. “I thought, ‘This is a very difficult role.’ You could say that Ingrid is unethical, but in other ways, as some kind of artist, I’m dealing with my own personal shit as well. But I’m also, in some ways, cannibalizing the things around me. I don’t necessarily judge Ingrid in that sense.”

After playing a lovesick and lost 30-something in Joachim Trier’s wondrous coming-of-ager, the Norwegian actress thrives as a seemingly charming but fundamentally dubious girl-next-door (in her first English-speaking role). “Renate, in some ways, makes this character more unlikable,” Schimberg adds. “I think she enjoyed the comedy of somebody who was just plowing through without regard for anybody else. She plays this with a certain nuance that I can’t imagine anybody else having as much fun with this role, and embracing her dark side, while also making it light and making her relatable.”

Of the fundamental outcomes of A Different Man, of what this alarming love triangle that’s only ever pointing one way might suggest, Schimberg isn’t too sure what happens after. “I purposely avoid thinking about backstory. I don’t know [what] a character is doing two minutes before the scene starts. I know what they’re saying, but I don’t know if we can believe them,” he explains. “A lot of people talk about this as a fable or some kind of moral tale, but I’m a little hesitant about that designation, because I empathize with all these characters, and I think they’re all struggling in various ways.”

Did Edward make the right choice? And if he did, who among us has the power to designate that? “I purposefully had the doctor tell him, ‘You need to have the surgery, your condition is getting worse,’” Schimberg points out. “I tried to take the morality out of it. What happens is not him being punished for doing this thing. It comes with some positive things and some negative things and some neutral outcomes. It changes his life, and it doesn’t change his life. It’s all, really, a reflection of who he was before.”