1 of 5 | Sebastian Stan stars in “A Different Man.” Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute
PARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 22 (UPI) — A Different Man, which premiered Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, has good intentions and a lot of big ideas. Unfortunately, the film can’t juggle all of them and winds up frustrating instead.
Edward (Sebastian Stan) has a facial deformity that requires frequent surgeries to manage growths obstructing hearing and vision. Edward’s new neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), comes over to get to know him but Edward fears she can’t get beyond his appearance.
When Edward’s doctor offers him the chance to participate in an experimental treatment, he jumps at the chance. The treatment causes his growths to literally peel from his face, leaving Stan’s natural face underneath.
Edward creates an entirely new identity for himself as Guy, a real estate agent. That’s the sort of premise that can be a logline for a movie. It certainly was similar to the festival description of the film.
Unfortunately, the film can’t seem to focus its plot about Guy’s journey and its statements about how society views people with different conditions. Writer/director Aaron Schimberg drops major plots as soon as he’s done with them, but the series of events doesn’t add up to much.
When Guy moves into a new apartment, he tells the doctors for the treatment that Edward died by suicide. This gets the medical team out of the movie at this point, but there should have been an organic way to integrate the medical story into the rest of the film.
But already at this point, A Different Man has had bizarre tonal shifts. The peeling of Edward’s face takes more than one scene and it is as graphic as a David Cronenberg movie.
That’s a sharp contrast to the tone thus far, which was heightened but not totally surreal. It was like our world but just a little off.
There’d been a bit of cringe comedy to that point, with random strangers waving to Edward. The police wake Edward up in the middle of the night knocking on the wrong door.
An ice cream truck tries to pass a parked ambulance but why is an ice cream truck out in the middle of the night? Just being illogical isn’t itself funny.
Plus, Edward acted in an HR video for businesses to teach their employees to treat colleagues with facial disfigurement sensitively. That video was comical for its misguidedness in “othering” the people with facial conditions in the guise of helping them.
But, it gets far more obscure. At first, Guy still struggles to adjust to his new face. He still wobbles like Edward, not used to having a face proportional to his body.
That would be interesting to explore but the film shifts focus again when Guy discovers that Ingrid has written a play about Edward. So he auditions for it.
A man acting in a play about his own life could be very derivative of Charlie Kaufman, but in that regard, Schimberg does have his own take.
Guy is performing Ingrid’s impression of him, never revealing that he used to be Edward. Guy also saved a mask of his Edward face which he wears for the play. The lab made masks of his original face at the beginning, and his potential new one as part of the treatment.
Ingrid seems to fetishize Edward. This leads to a bizarre love scene, but could still be a powerful story if it followed through. If Guy found out Ingrid actually liked Edward now that it’s too late, that would be a movie.
But, A Different Man shifts focus again when actor Oswald (Adam Pearson) visits the show because he heard about auditions for actors with facial disfigurements. Ingrid decides it would be better to have someone with an actual facial disfigurement play Edward.
Ironically, A Different Man itself put prosthetics on Stan to play Edward. However, the film gives Pearson a major role. That, plus a willingness to explore how the world sees people with facial disfigurement, are noble endeavors.
However, the only way the film addresses those issues is by allowing a lot of random characters to rant about how society views people. It is poignant that Oswald is so gregarious he wins everyone over, while Guy sees what Edward’s life might have been like had he had Oswald’s confidence.
But, there was nothing wrong with the way Edward was either. He has every right to be introverted, and he was still friendly to neighbors and strangers.
The story goes further and further off the rails with several more plot twists. Guy is confused about his new identity and his old feelings, but he just flails around trying to find things to do and ways to connect with people.
At one point Guy literally flails around at another character.
Movies with wildly different tones and themes can work, as evidenced by the films of Charlie Kaufman, Quentin Tarnatino, Daniels and others. A Different Man goes for it but falls apart long before it’s finished switching things up.
A24 will release A Different Man.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
Bugonia (Photo – Focus Features)
House of Bugonia
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, the film plays out like a chamber piece after Plemons’s character, the unstable Teddy, kidnaps Stone’s character, the “pure corporate evil” (his words), Michelle Fuller, with the reluctant help of Teddy’s cousin Donnie, played by newcomer Aidan Delois.
The reason for the kidnapping is best described as idiosyncratic.
After being subjected to a brutal ordeal—she’s shown in the opening minutes undergoing extensive martial arts training—Michelle is confined to a basement, where she and Teddy engage in a tense game of cat-and-mouse. The direction these exchanges take was not what I expected.
The cast is excellent. Of Emma Stone, I can only quote Celluloid Heroes by The Kinks: “If you cover him with garbage, George Sanders would still have style.” Well, Stone’s Michelle Fuller isn’t covered in garbage, but she is drenched in blood, some of it her own, shot with electricity, beaten, tackled, shorn, and chained. And yet, there’s that voice, those green eyes, and the way she’s photographed in corporate power attire at the start: from the bottom of the frame, she looks ten feet tall, every bit the star.
I first saw Jesse Plemons shooting a kid in cold blood on Breaking Bad, and with his recessed eyes and jutting chin, he retains that ruthlessness with a hint of madness. He’s like an auto wreck you can’t look away from. Aidan Delois, though his lines grow sparser as the movie progresses, does a remarkable job of acting with his eyes. They seem to know what his confused mind doesn’t.
There’s cruelty in Bugonia, to be sure, but it’s nothing like the impaling of a black cat I recall from Lanthimos’s otherwise-excellent Dogtooth. In fact, given the film’s underlying themes of allegiances, the shocking scenes are stomach-turning but motivated.
I liked Poor Things, Lanthimos’s last film, but Bugonia is even better.
> Playing at Regency Academy Cinemas, Regal Paseo, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, AMC Santa Anita 16, Regal UA La Canada, AMC Laemmle Glendale, and LOOK Dine-In Cinemas Monrovia.
Netflix delivers a black-and-white biopic of famed French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard and the making of his first feature film, Breathless. The movie delivers a compelling look at the filmmaking process. But harsh (if limited) language, suggestive moments, some spiritual fumbling and constant smoking could make this a tricky film to navigate.
The pre-release screening of “Sentimental Value,” which played on Saturday, Nov. 8 at the Goldsmith Family Cinema, was both confusing and simple. A collection of vaguely assorted scenes with a lack of focus, the movie was also an interesting exploration into a troubled family desperate to improve. Although I understand why a lot of people like this movie, I think “Sentimental Value” could’ve been much better.
There were some elements I just didn’t understand. I’m not knowledgeable about the film industry or film production, so there were some references that I didn’t get. I wonder if I would like the movie more if I understood the film buff references and the jokes related to Norwegian culture, both of which flew over my head. I mean, this is quite literally a film about filmmaking. I feel similarly whenever an author focuses on their craft so directly: It detracts from the movie. It’s like a writer writing about writing; it feels almost redundant.
The movie has a relatively simple plot that’s filled in with a lot of character scenes. In short, the film focuses on the lives and journeys of two sisters, Agnes and Nora. Their father, Gustav, was a film director, but he left them both. Agnes has a child, while Nora remains single and focuses on her acting career. The general plot structure is fine, and I actually think Gustav is a really chilly character, in an unsettling way. His very presence brings an air of unease into every scene he’s in. The character of Gustav is really intriguing and shines far above most of the other characters in the film.
The central flaw of the movie is how unfocused it is. There are a lot of scenes that seem to be there to show off cinematography more than anything else. The film employs swift cuts to black between scenes, which is quite jarring and leaves little room for cohesion. It makes it seem like the director doesn’t know how to transition between scenes and is just throwing them together. I think there should’ve been a clearer sense of temporality to the movie with the past and present divided into separate worlds because right now, the flashback scenes look and feel basically the same as the modern-day scenes. I will say the camera quality and minute-to-minute cinematography is well crafted, but it’s not perfect.
I will give a huge amount of praise to the music, which is rich and fulfilling. I almost wonder if “Sentimental Value” would be better as a playlist than as a movie. The soundtrack is warm and comforting, fitting right into the movie and enhancing each scene.
We also get a slight hint of WW2 and Nazi elements in the movie, with Nora and Agnes’ family being victims. This is more of a backdrop than a main focus, which is a bit unfortunate. I wonder how the movie would be different if they made this historical context a primary focus. They could’ve explored the impact of wartime trauma destroying families across generations.
Also, speaking of missed opportunities…
It’s both interesting and sad how Agnes’ child, Erik, is the least boring part of “Sentimental Value.” He almost feels like the emotional center here, in a subplot where Gustav wants to have his grandchild play a role in his movie. Gustav wants to relive his golden years and connect with his grandchildren, but Agnes is still wary of him and doesn’t want to. I was quite invested in this conflict across three generations, and I wanted to see more of it. Sadly, it doesn’t go anywhere. It reminds me of another film, “Happyend” (2024), where there’s a balanced sibling-like relationship with two characters, done much better than “Sentimental Value.” Here, the focus is primarily on Nora, and Agnes really doesn’t have much screen time. I think the storyline with Agnes and Erik should’ve been a major part of the story. This plot could’ve ended many ways: either with Agnes realizing her child should bond with their grandpa, or Gustav realizing not to control his family.
The lack of this conclusion makes me wonder if there was a practical consideration about the difficulty of working with child actors. Even then, there were better ways to end that story! This brings me back to the lack of structure within the movie; it needed to have better pacing to make the story work. As it stands, the ending of “Sentimental Value” falls flat.
“Sentimental Value” is a film with a lot of room for improvement, if only the filmmaker had sorted out the disorganized nature and lack of focus within the movie. In the end, however, I can somewhat appreciate what it went for. Even if the execution wasn’t the best, the atmosphere, characters, and music made for a pretty fascinating movie.
Total rating: 3 stars
Atharv Dimri can be reached at adimri@wesleyan.edu.
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