Edward, a man made a stranger to himself by illness and the reactions of others, moves between the desire for affirmation and the disillusionment of a world that demands he be something other than himself.

Trapped in a corporeality that relegates him to the margins, he accepts an experimental treatment that grants him the ambiguous gift of normality. His transformation, rather than opening up spaces of freedom, chains him to a new paradox: what once made him invisible now strips him of authenticity. The narrative insists on this reversal, yet it does so in a programmatic way, as if the film were more interested in reaffirming a concept than in truly questioning it.

The film ventures into the thorny territory of identity and social perception, attempting to construct a discourse that, however, is burdened by an overabundance of themes and a lack of subtlety in its writing. Cinema has often explored the dualism between being and appearing, but here the attempt translates into a mechanical demonstration of a thesis rather than a genuine search for the meaning of existence.

The opportunism of Ingrid, the aspiring playwright who exploits Edward's story for her artistic purposes, is just one of many elements that contribute to an overly contrived structure. The meta-theatrical play—where Edward/Guy witnesses his own identity being expropriated by an "other" who embodies his former condition—should be the pulsating heart of the film’s reflection, yet it resolves into a predictable construction, lacking the tension necessary to truly engage the viewer.

The film moves along predetermined tracks: it states the thesis that difference, once absorbed into the norm, becomes a kind of condemnation, and it develops this paradox in a literal way, without ever questioning the real implications of this dialectic. The narrative, though aspiring to a brilliant and subversive reading, ends up weighed down by rhetoric that oscillates between the didactic and the emotionally coercive, leaving no room for genuine interpretative ambiguity. The abundance of messages—from body shaming to criticism of conformism, from the commodification of diversity to the theme of success as deception—accumulates without a true synthesis, dissipating into a multitude of surface-level insights.

But the most significant issue, and perhaps the most overlooked, is that the protagonist seems to lack a true personality, both in his illness and in his recovery/normalization. Edward possesses no real identity, neither when he is marginalized nor when he becomes socially acceptable. His fate is always determined by others: by the doctor who offers him a way out, by the neighbor who exploits his story, by the new outsider who dethrones him. It is as if the film suggests that the true tragedy does not lie in deformity or its disappearance, but in the absence of an authentic self, of an inner voice that can escape the categorizations imposed from the outside.

In the end, one wonders if the real issue at stake is not deformity or its erasure, but the tragic impossibility of possessing an authentic identity in a world that always demands we be something other than ourselves—though even this seems unconvincing. Unlike other works that have skillfully played with the concept of identity metamorphosis, here the writing relies on a mechanism that inexorably moves toward proving its premise, depriving the story of that shadowy area where doubt and unease could generate a truly aesthetic and existential experience. The result is a film that claims to subvert expectations but ends up reaffirming predictable patterns, never truly challenging the viewer’s perspective. A missed opportunity, an exercise in style that piles up ideas without managing to give them a depth that is genuinely unsettling.

14-Mar-2025 by Beatrice