Things Will Be Different (now streaming on Hulu) is lo-fi sci-fi to make your brain fry. Well, at least a little. The debut feature from writer/director Michael Felker is an ideas-before-meretriciousness action-drama whose key plot component is time travel, which inevitably gives me a headache no matter how good the movie is – I contemplated popping an Excedrin at roughly the 36-minute mark, as the concept complicates and you can’t help but wonder if it’ll hold up under logical scrutiny. But this is one of those scrappy little indie flicks that you can’t help but admire despite its flaws.
The Gist: Sidney (Riley Dandy) carries a rifle over her shoulder and knows how to use it. Please note that it’s a deer rifle, and I’d hazard it had never been fired at a person – but that’ll change soon. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. She enters a rustic restaurant with only one patron, her brother Joe (Adam David Thompson), also deer-rifled. He’s got two plates of food on the counter, one for him and one for her, and two bags of cash on the floor, also one for him and one for her. How he got them doesn’t matter. What does matter is the siren in the distance, and you don’t need to be a mathematician to add up this equation. It’s not a shock to Sidney. She’s in on it. She wants the money for herself and her 10-year-old daughter; they seem to be struggling. I don’t think she perpetrated the unnamed crime, but she stands to benefit from Joe’s actions. They grab their guns and cash and skedaddle.
After a trek through the woods they arrive at their destination, an old isolated farmhouse. They enter cautiously. They eyeball all the grandfather clocks. They eyeball the closet doors. They eyeball an old rotary phone. Then Joe gets out a notebook and follows the directions: They dial a specific number on the phone and speak some hoodoo woo-woo words (I think the language was Latin or Satanese) and do some finagling with the clocks and walk through the closet and emerge in another timeline, notably one where the cops aren’t on their ass. They’ll hang out in this thread of existence for 14 days, then return home after the heat dies down. THE PERFECT CRIME, except I dunno if that’s particularly airtight, but let’s just go with it. Sidney will miss her daughter dearly but it’s worth it, and besides, she and Joe are long overdue for some sibling bonding.
There’s some weird shit about this reality, though. You eat everything until the fridge is empty and shut the door and open it and it’s magically refilled. Creepy portrait paintings hang on the walls. Save for the TV and a couple other accoutrements, it looks like nobody’s lived there for decades. How’d Joe find out about it? A girl he used to date. How else would he know about it? One doesn’t just find a convenient rental on Metaphysical AirBnB. Joe and Sidney chill and drink and laugh and come Day 14, things aren’t right, and you can tell because the musical score tells us some ominous portent is underway. Things start to go awry, a level of awryness of a rather disconcerting nature. Sidney tries to escape the farm but she can’t get very far before she suddenly starts violently vomiting blood. They find a dead body, they find a riddle carved into a podium, they “summon” a safe that contains a tape recorder allowing them to communicate with an unknown person who wants them to follow some rather cryptic instructions. This is about when my head started to hurt, but I hung on, and didn’t regret it.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bits of Omni Loop, Primer and Looper, but ultimately Things Will Be Different is like Christopher Nolan minus $198 million in budgetary expenditures.
Performance Worth Watching: Dandy and Thompson’s dynamic is natural and lived-in, both communicating character background via inference – no clunky exposition passing for dialogue here. They feel like siblings with shared upbringings and traumas, and their relationship becomes the movie’s core, smartly trumping the bigger, headier concept.
Memorable Dialogue: This loaded exchange:
Sidney: It’s nice to have hope.
Joe: Gotta love hope.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Things Will Be Different takes pains to balance its big ideas with the understated, yet palpable emotion between Joe and Sidney. I mentioned Nolan earlier, and as brilliant as his films can be, there was the nagging sense that he forgot to write any compelling characters for Tenet, and let its grandiose metaphysics not just take center stage, but fill the auditorium. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare Felker and the century’s great populist auteur, but Things does a lot with a teensy fraction of a Hollywood Oscar darling’s assets. The decisions Felker’s characters make are spurred by emotion, couching the story’s complex intellectualism in irony.
And that renders the tense action of the climax just as potent as a heated argument Sidney and Joe fall into in the middle of the film. It’s worth noting that Sidney spurs the squabble by overthinking their situation, which is wise advice for anyone watching the film. (More irony!) Scrutiny and the movie will not be tight bros, as a couple of developments down the stretch are head-scratchers that feel shoehorned in as attempted profound overtures than anything logical. (Maybe scrutiny and the movie will grow closer with repeated viewings, as is often true with brain/timebenders.)
But the final scenes swoop in to deepen the film’s characters and themes, making subtle observations and creating metaphors for the frailty of the human condition – the title Things Will Be Different is a promise people frequently make but cannot realize, due to our psychological redundancies and the behavioral cul-de-sacs that trap us in tedious, debilitating and sometimes destructive action. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that could break such patterns is time travel.
Our Call: At this point, after way too many movies (read: there can never be enough movies), it takes a lot to win me over with a time-travel plot. But Things Will Be Different injects enough substance into the usual twisty fodder to make it worthwhile. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
