Adam David Thompson, drama, film festivals, Michael Felker, movies, reviews, Riley Dandy, sci-fi, science fiction, SXSW, SXSW Film and TV Festival, SXSW Film Festival, Things Will Be Different
November 18, 2024
by Carla Hay
“Things Will Be Different” (2024)
Directed by Michael Felker
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed area of the United States, the sci-fi drama film “Things Will Be Different” features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A brother and a sister are stuck at a farmhouse where they can time travel and are under attack by mysterious forces.
Culture Audience: “Things Will Be Different” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of time-traveling movies and sci-fi movies films about convoluted puzzle solving.
“Things Will Be Different” has an ambitious time-traveling concept revolving around a brother and a sister. Unfortunately, this botched sci-fi drama gets caught up in being too mysterious for viewers to care what happens to these underdeveloped characters. This is the type of movie where viewers will start to lose interest about 30 minutes into the film because the basic plot of the movie still hasn’t been coherently explained by then.
Written and directed by Michael Felker, “Things Will Be Different” is his feature-film directorial debut. The movie had its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It’s a low-budget film with a very small number of people in the cast and very few locations but the movie has a lot of problems with its narrative structure. The majority of the film’s scenes take place at a farmhouse in an unnamed area of the United States. (“Things Will Be Different” was actually filmed in Fremont, Indiana.)
“Things Will Be Different” begins by showing a phone call between the protagonist siblings (who are in their 30s), as they talk about meeting up the next day. The brother says to his sister, “We can catch up on some brother/sister rekindling time. See you in the morning.”
The brother is Joseph, also known as Joe (played by Adam David Thompson), who is a former bar owner. Joseph’s sister is Sidney (played by Riley Dandy), who owns a pawn shop. Joseph is a bachelor with no children. Sidney is a single mother to a 6-year-old daughter, who is not seen in the movie. Sidney’s daughter has given a handmade bracelet to Sidney, who wears it as a good luck charm. The parents of Joseph and Sidney are deceased.
Joseph and Sidney meet up at a diner and have the type of pleasant but strained conversation that people have when they haven’t seen a relative for quite a while and have had a period of tense estrangement. Most of the movie’s dialogue is very forgettable and bland. Sidney and Joseph quickly leave the diner when they hear a police siren.
It’s explained later in the movie why the sound of a police siren is cause for the siblings to be alarmed: Sidney and Joseph have committed a robbery. And they are going to a hideout that was arranged for them in advance. This isn’t spoiler information because it’s part of the official plot description for the movie.
Later in “Things Will Be Different,” it’s mentioned that Sidney got arrested (the movie doesn’t say why she was arrested) when she was 24 years old and going through a rebellious phase in her life, but she has (until ths robbery, at least) supposedly turned her life around and become a responsible adult. Joseph distanced himself from her during this low period in Sidney’s life, and she has lingering resentment toward Joseph over what she thinks is his emotional abandonment. That’s about all viewers will learn about the personal lives of these two siblings in this very muddled movie.
Sidney and Joseph make their way to a farmhouse in a wooded area with a nearby corn field. There are three men parked in the house’s driveway as unwelcome trespassers. Sidney takes out a rifle, shoots the gun near the three strangers and yells, “You have five seconds to get off of my land!” Joseph has a shotgun and shoots too. The three men quickly drive away,
The house is abandoned and looks like it hasn’t been lived in for quite some time, because in the front hallway, there’s a dead cat with flies buzzing around it. Inside the house, Joseph and Sidney spin the hands on two separate clocks to try and open a locked closet door. The clocks seem to work as combination lock keys to open the closet. Sidney uses a rotary phone to call someone and says something in an unknown language.
It turns out that this how Joseph and Sidney have turned back time by about two weeks. Sidney later tells Joseph that it’s kind of weird how the owner of this house let them borrow the house but didn’t tell them how the house works. And who is or was the owner of this house? Don’t expect to get the answer to that question until much later in the movie, which becomes even more convoluted as it stumbles along.
The rest of “Things Will Be Different” is a repetitive slog of Joseph and Sidney finding mysterious written messages in the house and communicating by audiocassette recorder with an unknown man, who seems to be watching the siblings’ every move. What’s strange about this communication is that every time the play button on the recorder is pushed, it works like two-way walkie talkie instead of a recorder. Don’t expect an explanation for that either.
Here’s an example of what could have been an intriguing sequence but just falls flat with tedium: Sidney and Joseph see a wooden sign on the closet door that says, “Go to the mill,” with no explanation for how that sign got on the door when it wasn’t there before. When the siblings find the miil, there’s a human body inside that’s completely burned. Sidney and Joseph unrealistically barely react to this gruesome discovery.
The siblings then see this puzzling message scratched on a wooden table: “You are in the group on the rise. I’m on the left side. Another is the right. Give in or join them. Carve here to comply.”
The unknown person who’s been communicating with them tells Joseph and Sidney that the siblings are in the middle of the right and left. The mystery man adds, “Someone is coming: an unknown visitor. All we know is that they are using the door and leaving destruction in their wake.”
If all of this is too obscure for you to know what this movie is about, you should know that “Things Will Be Different” is a tedious loop of this vagueness for the majority of the movie’s 102-minute run time, with filler scenes of Joseph and Sidney doing a lot of bickering about what they should do next. The movie’s performances are adequate, but the screenplay is like a tangled knot of yarn with many loose ends that go nowhere. It’s one of those irritating movies that is poorly written but tries to make viewers feel not very smart if viewers don’t know what’s going on in the movie.
Viewers who are patient enough to watch all of “Things Will Be Different” might be very let down by the plot twist/reveal at the end because the plot twist/reveal is so derivative. How derivative is it? It’s almost exactly the same plot twist/reveal as a better-known low-budget sci-fi thriller about people stuck in a house in a remote wooded area. (Hint: The other movie was Drew Goddard’s feature-film directorial debut and had Chris Hemsworth in the cast.)
In the production notes for “Things Will Be Different,” Felker describes “Things Will Be Different” this way: “It’s a heady movie where you won’t pick up everything it’s putting down the first time around, but you’ll have a blast watching it, and hopefully that’ll compel you to watch it again and pick up more stuff to piece together on the eighth, maybe ninth time.”
Watching a movie eight or nine times assumes that viewers will love it enough to invest that much time for those repeat viewings. It’s hard to imagine a lot of people wanting to see “Things Will Be Different” eight or nine times when the movie does a substandard job of telling the story the first time that people see this disappointing film.
Magnet Releasing released “Things Will Be Different” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on October 4, 2024.