There comes a moment in director and writer’s Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” when the film’s two leads, Edward and Ingrid, played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve respectively, are eating in a diner. A man walking outside the diner stops at the window and starts waving to Edward. Ingrid is surprised. Does Edward know this man? Edward says no but that this happens to him often. “People just wave.”
It’s a moment that a disabled audience will keenly feel at several points of “A Different Man.” Edward deals with a severe facial deformity that causes people to stare at him, gasp and, in the case at the diner, randomly wave at him.