THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT - Mark Reviews Movies

Things Will Be Different, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 3, 2024

There's a stretch of Things Will Be Different in which our protagonists, a brother-sister duo of thieves-in-hiding, wait for something to happen. Of course, we're waiting, too, for writer/director Michael Felker to pay off any of the promise this low-key piece of science-fiction mind-bending shows at the start. Instead, the movie takes its few intriguing ideas and runs them either in circles or into the ground.

Nothing seems extraordinary about the initial setup. Sidney (Riley Dandy) is making her way off the main roads and out of sight, cautious and suspicious of anyone noticing her. She finally arrives in a small-town diner, where a man is the only customer there. He's Joseph (Adam David Thompson), her brother, and the two talk vaguely of their estranged relationship and the subject of some bags by Joseph's feet.

It's cash—lots of it. They were expecting five but ended up with seven, leaving us to assume millions, after robbing some place or someone, and that's enough for both of them to live more than comfortably and come up with some dreams to fulfill.

At this point, it's best not to ask any questions about the money, its origins, why these two would steal that much in the first place, what the actual nature of the siblings' relationship is, how they came up with this idea in spite of being estranged, or any of the basics of Felker's premise. The filmmaker doesn't seem interested in the answers to such basic queries, and besides, there will be many, many more questions to ask soon enough.

Felker doesn't seem to have many answers to those, either. The pair leave the diner at the sound of nearby police sirens and flee to another subject of broad conversation: a safehouse in the middle of nowhere. Someone told Joseph about it, and that's enough for him. They arrive, chase off some random guys hanging out on the property with the rifles the two are carrying, and, when the sirens start getting closer, have to find a place to hide.

Here's where things get very, very strange. The house is a kind of puzzle, apparently, with grandfather clocks that serve as combination locks, a closet that's much bigger than it looks on the outside, and a rotary telephone that requires certain words be spoken into it. Joseph has all of this information in a notebook, and after following the instructions exactly, he and Sidney find themselves in the same house. However, there are no sirens. The rooms are clean, furnished, and filled with various photos and knickknacks, and Joseph announces that they are now in a different time. They just have to wait in the house in the past until things die down in the present, when they can return and put that cash to some use.

All of this is quite neat, both in that its intriguing and communicated with a surprising degree of simplicity by Felker. We're with it, because of the practicality of the extraordinary technology at play and the collective mystery of the enigmatic house, the time-travel mechanics, and the characters, who hint at some shared pain in the past and a need to make things right in the present. Well, it's technically the future where/when they are, but the point still stands.

Felker imagines a couple of other nifty conceits and puzzles here, including a tape recorder, locked in a safe with its own instructions, that allows the siblings to speak with someone from a different time and a dead body in an underground church. What is going on here?

One guess is as good as another, because Felker focuses on the mechanics of the various concepts instead of any explanation. That's fine, until it becomes apparent that the filmmaker is primarily interested in the mechanics of this plot, which doesn't amount to much, as the mysterious voice on the tape recorder tell the duo to kill an intruder who has entered this spacetime, and keeps winding itself around to arrive at an ironic twist that feels counterintuitive, contradictory, and not like much of a resolution.

A better interrogation than what's happening, then, is how this goes wrong. Much of it is the sense of mystery, which extends beyond the odd workings of the house and the timeline, because these characters remain a puzzle, too. They're little more than pawns in the narrative's twisty game, going through the steps laid out for them and not offering much but vague details in return. There's little reason to be invested in them, and that's a problem when the story's final moves are intended to pack an emotional punch.

The whole of Things Will Be Different, though, is all mystery and some novel ideas. The early curiosity about how any of this works and what it means to those characters ultimately isn't worth it, because the movie never develops its conceits or characters.

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