MIRROR IMAGES

‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”

- Justin Chang

Horror movies have taught us to shudder before a bathroom mirror, lest an assailant suddenly appear, looming behind an unsuspecting protagonist, as the medicine-cabinet door swings shut. But not all reflections are jump scares in waiting, and not all victims and predators are distinguishable. This week brings two pictures, each a conceptually bold, mordantly funny cautionary tale, in which a mirror bears witness to an astonishing transformation—a miracle, or so it seems, that gradually curdles into a nightmare. In “A Different Man,” a disfigured face is peeled off, revealing smooth skin and chiselled features just underneath. In “The Substance,” a woman’s dream of eternal youth is fulfilled as she gives violent birth to her own younger, shapelier doppelgänger. You needn’t be a David Cronenberg fan (though I suspect one of the filmmakers is) to find yourself murmuring his most famous mantra: “Long live the new flesh.”

In “A Different Man,” a thrillingly mercurial third feature from the writer and director Aaron Schimberg, Sebastian Stan plays Edward Lemuel, a mildmannered New Yorker with a genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis. With bulging tumors above the neck, he’s “facially different,” in the parlance of a workplace sensitivity-training video in which he appears as an actor. But little such sensitivity greets Edward in the real world. People gawk and flinch on the subway; a comely neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), upon meeting him, lets out an involuntary shriek. She and Edward soon strike up a friendship, but the suspicion lingers that Ingrid, an aspiring writer, might be nosing around for good material. Sure enough, she later drafts a semi-biographical play, titled “Edward,” which she keeps shredding and rewriting, struggling to walk an empathetic tightrope over an exploitative chasm.