“Things Will Be Different” (2024) is about a brother and sister, Joseph (Adam David Thompson), aka “Joe,” and Sidney (Riley Dandy), who decide to pull off one last heist with a full proof escape plan—hide in a rural Michigan safe house outside of their time for two weeks. When the two weeks are up, they cannot return to their timeline, and they are willing to do anything to get back. They receive instructions to eliminate The Visitor (Chloe Skoczen). Will they succeed?
Michael Felker makes his feature writing and directorial debut after years of editing such outstanding films as “Spring” (2014) and “The Endless” (2017). Directors of the latter two films, Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson, act and serve as executive producers in “Things Will Be Different,” but past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the title is a threat to those moviegoers expecting otherwise. Joseph’s day job is as a bartender and Sidney runs a pawnshop. The pair share a criminal past which Joe feels guilty about, but Sidney does not hold a grudge against him. The actors transmit an intelligence disproportionate to their characters who are clearly screwups who do not learn from the past. Felker, Thompson and Dandy clearly adore their characters, but from a viewer’s perspective, confusing intelligence with likability is the mistake, and perhaps they should have started with the bar lower for those two, so their subsequent messes are less annoying and more aligned with expectations. Besides Joe’s guilt, we are supposed to root for Sidney because she is a mother who wants to get back to her daughter, Stephanie. While they are universal, relatable characteristics, the actors are left with a heavy burden to fill in the blanks with their solid performances.
“Things Will Be Different” should be a shorter movie and confuses dragging out the proceedings with suspense. Felker takes these deep pauses by having a character pose a question then wait for minutes for a response from someone in the room or in another location. Sometimes for fun, he will show the character’s astonishment upon discovering something, switch to another scene, then return to show the answer. For instance, to communicate with some mysterious, unseen people who hold the tickets to their return trip, the siblings use a cassette recorder in a safe. They hit play to receive instructions and record to respond. Sometimes they put the cassette recorder back in the safe to keep the communication lines open. Because this technique is not used judiciously, it stops being clever and starts becoming aggravating just when the long-delayed excitement gets started, which means there is a danger that the audience will stop caring long before the denouement.
The safe is in a church-like area filled with pews and stain glass, which feels like the meat of the movie. Joe builds a shrine while Sydney engages in more practical activities during their time in purgatory. She gets aggravated because she constantly hears him talking to the tape recorder more than her. Clearly Felker is making a statement about faith and trying to make sense of a sensational situation, which leads to the mystery of who is responsible for this phenomenon: God, science or aliens. By the time that he reveals the answer, “Things Will Be Different” feels like a sci-fi, unofficial sequel to “Experimenter” (2015) with its theme of agentic state behavior and a disembodied voice having the power of life or death over people to force obedience. It is the old Abraham problem expanded to feature length: obey or choose your family. This explanation is clearer in this review than Felker’s movie, which tells more than he shows. He prioritizes depicting the banal over the interesting, and his prose dumps have the opposite effect of getting people invested in the story.
One conversation rises to the level of a cinematic cardinal sin. Instead of letting nature take its course and waiting for the Reddit forums to fill with theories of the origins of the safe house, the mechanics of time travel and the people behind it, the siblings discuss their theories, which is not innately problematic until Joe sarcastically frames his theories as if a bunch of fans already chimed in with theories off screen. Joe responds to Sydney’s theories as if they are a stretch as if the entire scenario is not outlandish. Meta dialogue is no longer fresh or cutting edge in the twenty-first century, and this scene runs the risk of snapping that slim thread suspending disbelief. It felt smug and self-satisfied. Some films do not deliver answers, but still feel coherent, well-thought out and nicely executed as if the storyteller has a firm grasp of the mechanics of the created universe. It does not help that “Things Will Be Different” feels like one of those stories in which the filmmaker never had a clear grasp of the movie’s mythology and is throwing a bunch of crap against the wall to see if it will stick. Felker is more invested in the family dynamic and theme of betrayal.
Unfortunately, the family dynamic is thin. The backstory feels more like a sketch than rich with history. Though well-acted and as riveting as they can make such two-dimensional material, the characters are poorly developed and do not go on a huge emotional journey. It seems strange that the two are supposed to be estranged yet their first activity together is a heist, especially with someone who is not a reliable partner. People do dumb things all the time so it is a credible scenario, but Felker clearly loves these people without offering a reason. The pair are the same from the beginning to the end just under different conditions. The first twist, the identity of The Visitor, is annoying and unsatisfying. If you predicted the twist in “Strange Darling” (2024) within the first few minutes, do not watch “Things Will Be Different”. If you did not, then this movie will blow your mind, and you will probably want to watch it repeatedly. If you hate it, you may rewatch it just to make sure that you did not miss something amazing the first time around but save yourself some time and do not bother. You did not. If anyone devoted an ounce of thought to the setup, the revelation does not work.
Despite the budget restrictions, “Things Will Be Different” has a great set up, an intriguing location and an evocative soundtrack that contrasts with the gravity of the circumstances. Unfortunately, humans cannot live on atmosphere alone. At some point, catharsis should come into play. It is more like bad M. Night Shyamalan if he was less old-fashioned, moralistic and optimistic. New rule: if a movie involves time travel, skip it.
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The Visitor is an adult Steph, who cannot talk and wears a face wrap. She does write in a notebook. Why does not she just reveal her identity, so her uncle stops trying to kill her? Reasons! He never discovers her identity and accidentally kills his sister. So he keeps trying to go back into time to save her, which is how he got into this mess in the first place. Going back in time means killing his younger, past self repeatedly like in “The Prestige” (2006). Ugh I’ve turned into such a Christopher Nolan stan but if someone is doing a bad imitation, I have no choice. He eventually gives up and begs his sister to kill him, which she does instead of running away, and it is strongly implied that the police catch her. Sydney lives but cannot be with her daughter. The family is fated to have the worst lives. What happened to their parents? Dunno. Who cares. I’m out. I adore Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s work before “Synchronic” (2019) though I still need to see “Something in the Dirt” (2022), “Moon Knight” (2022) and the second season of “Loki” (2023). If you prefer their later work, maybe Felker is for you, but give me their classic work before they became mainstream. It seems as if “The Endless” will be their greatest accomplishment.
