When a director's feature film debut is executive produced by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, you have my attention. Case in point: Things Will Be Different, from writer/director Michael Felker, is a complicated, twisted story of estranged siblings Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) who have found a way to commit a heist and then hide out for a couple of weeks in a farmhouse in a different time by means of a time travel machine hidden in a closet. Hell, even that one-sentence plot synopsis was rough on the brain. Things are looking good for their return, until they aren’t. Right when they’re about to jump back in time, signs appear (literally) that tell them not to return yet, and that’s when things get warped.
Since Jospeh and Sidney aren’t especially close any longer, they don’t fully trust each other with any variation in their plans. They find a way to talk to some unseen person across time and space via an old-school tape recorder, who attempts to give them instructions of some tasks that need completing before they can go home (Sidney has a little girl who she’s desperate to get back to), including killing a new, masked player at the farmhouse who seems especially suited to defending themselves. They also can’t stray too far off the property or death will befall them. No one attempts to find out why or how any of this is happening, and the movie is all the better for it.
I appreciated Things Will Be Different’s lo-fi approach to its science-fiction elements, but the metaphor of this brother and sister who haven’t talked in a while being literally stuck in the past seems a little much, especially as they periodically go through the history of their fractured relationship as they deal with getting back to their time. At some point, I think we discover that we’re in something of a time-loop situation, and we’re even introduced to a pair of time “agents” (Benson and Sarah Bolger), who see this situation as a failure and are prepared to erase the two from existence, until Joseph comes up with a possible solution.
Inevitably, you will get confused as the film becomes overly convoluted. At a certain point, you don’t know who you can trust or whether a fix is even in the cards. Even the agents seem like they’re conniving to get Joseph to do something to save his sister, and they simply manipulate him into coming up with their idea rather than suggest it to him. By the end, I was losing interest and beginning to tune out, looking for a conclusion rather than a solution, which is a bummer because the acting and minimalist visual style is praise worthy. For a debut feature, Things Will Be Different shows a ridiculous amount of promise that perhaps Felker can stick the landing the next time around.
The film is now playing in limited theatrical release and on VOD.
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