The Face That Wasn’t There

Oswald arrives maybe forty minutes in and suddenly everything clicks wrong.

The yellow color continues to stay in my mind. This aggressive mustard shade that follows Edward through his apartment building, seeps into the doctor's office walls, stains the bar where he sits alone. Wyatt Garfield captures everything through slightly unaligned camera positions which force viewers to adjust the image as if they were framing the scene themselves. The color scheme reveals all necessary information before the graph starts to present its data. Brown and yellow and sickly green, then suddenly clean whites and blues after Edward transforms into Guy. Except the yellows creep back. They always do.

Sebastian Stan wears Mike Marino's prosthetics for the first act and honestly, the makeup works too well. The film achieves its realistic effect through methods that avoid drawing attention to technical achievements. It just sits there on his face being a face. Which is the whole point, I guess. The words "I don't want to be a freak" come from Edward but his exhaustion shows more than his actual words. Actually, wait. That's not quite right. You believe he believes the exhaustion matters more than it does.

The movie maintains a strange tone which makes characters talk like they are in a Cassavetes film yet their body language resembles a Kaufman nightmare. Sometimes it lands perfectly askew. Sometimes it doesn't. Renate Reinsve plays Ingrid as this playwright who might be using Edward or might genuinely care, and the costume designer Miyako Bellizzi dresses her in these deliberately unremarkable clothes that somehow make her seem more unreadable. Lots of beige. Neutral sweaters. The wardrobe keeps all its contents completely hidden from view.

Then Adam Pearson shows up as Oswald. British, charming, has the same condition Edward just shed through experimental treatment. Schimberg delivers his strongest and most effective criticism at this point in his argument. Oswald demonstrates perfect control during his room movements and he drinks with assurance while wearing his suits in a perfect way. Pearson who has neurofibromatosis makes Stan's previous work appear as it actually was. Acting. The difference creates an uncomfortable feeling in your abdomen.

There's this moment. Edward, now calling himself Guy Moratz with his new handsome face, auditions for Ingrid's play about someone uncannily like his former self. He is currently testing to become the person he used to be. The casting people stare. Something's missing. His face is too symmetrical now, too forgettable in its conventional beauty. I started laughing, then stopped because nobody else in my screening was laughing and maybe it wasn't supposed to be funny? No, it was definitely funny. The whole thing commits so hard to its own absurd logic that it wraps back around to devastating.

The third act goes completely off the rails. Edward/Guy starts stalking Oswald, there's some business with a mask, everything turns into body horror by way of theatrical farce. Some of it works. Some of it really doesn't. The unexplained nature of this system became my main source of frustration because it did not function properly.

Look, here's what bothers me. The movie presents itself as a deep exploration of identity and acceptance yet it actually shows how one unlikable character fights against recognizing his facial issues were never the root of his problems. The information stands on its own merit without requiring all the philosophical elements that have been added. Sometimes Edward watches Oswald living his best life and Stan's eyes go dead in this specific way that makes you forget you're watching beautiful Sebastian Stan. That's the movie. Right there. Those five seconds of dead eyes. The rest of the content seems to exist only to support that disturbing discovery.

The story ends abruptly without any conclusion. Mid-thought, practically. Perfect.