Film review “Things Will Be Different” (2024)

“Things Will Be Different” is about two criminals, a brother and a sister, who commit crimes, use time travel to avoid punishment, and then get trapped in a farmhouse where a crime was committed, feeling like prisoners a temporal purgatory. Written and directed by first-time feature director Michael Felker (who co-edited the film with Rebeca Marques in a prismatic, non-linear style), it is an action thriller, a mystery film, a relationship drama, and a sound-and-light show all at once. It creates a world with its own rules and tells a story in its own visual language. It seems like it’s going to a very obvious conclusion, but then it turns around and introduces elements that create a new framework for the film. Fifteen minutes later it repeats itself and then again.

Not every element works – the film is better directed, edited and acted than written, and it may hit the conceptual reset button too many times, although of course your success will vary. But his command of tone and pace is remarkable, and the whole thing has an understated confidence that overcomes any specific complaints one might have.

It also embodies Pedro Almodovar’s principle that films should not just move; they should dance. There are three “passing of time” montages that are among the best I’ve ever seen, and the editing creates tension throughout, not just through speed and noise, but also through stillness and silence. There isn’t much music in “Things Will Be Different.” Maybe ninety percent of it unfolds with natural sound, that is, with the sounds that occur naturally wherever the characters are, be it in a musty basement or in a spooky forest. Films that do this give you the squeak of a step on the floorboard or the distant sound of something (or someone?) They move through the cornfield that borders the farmhouse that is the main setting of the story. This core set is explored so obsessively and with strategic repetition that it feels like a cursed dirt island in the American plains – a space that can seem either figurative or real depending on what’s happening in the story. (It’s not hard to imagine this story being reworked as a stage play.)

Oh yes, right: the story. It’s probably better if you don’t know everything, because it’s fun to see where it goes, but also because I think the film is ultimately less about logic and order and more about feeling and rhythm. I can tell you that brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and sister Sidney (Riley Dandy) arrive at the farmhouse with guns, drive away three men who were loitering outside the house, and go in there to do something against them is the law and also against the laws of time and space, unless you are Christopher Nolan or Alain Resnais (“Last Year in Marienbad”). The premise I laid out earlier – that this is a crime thriller in which the characters use time travel as a kind of cheat code – actually only applies to the first ten or fifteen minutes. It turns out the story is bigger.

We begin to receive fragmented parts of it real Story of Sidney and Joseph. They are not biological siblings. The story we are told makes Sidney sound like a ward who has become like a sibling. But they have the intuitive, playful energy of siblings, and when they move they are like cats trained to kill by the same mother. Both carry rifles with scopes and are good at using them. Their relationship is at the center of everything, giving the film an emotional pull that carries it through even the rougher patches.

Thompson and Dandy are outstanding actors, not only in scenes of hand-to-hand combat and gunfights, but also in quiet moments when they share a meal or talk about their past. And the chemistry between them is so compelling that I wouldn’t question it if the press releases told me they were real siblings. They trust each other’s words and anticipate each other’s reasoning, and sometimes one of them gets so emotional during an argument that he cries, but only a little. You can tell these people love each other with primal purity, which is exactly what you’d expect from leads in a film with powerful musicality, so much so that it feels more conducted than staged.

I often beat the drum here that cinema is about more than just a story or “content”. “Things Will Be Different” is a great example. It’s about what happens to the characters and what it means to them and how all the pieces of the fragmented story come together in your head at the end. But it’s also about the feelings of these characters when they are confronted with the reality of the unimaginable and scary facts of their situation. The film touches her deeply. But it also maintains a cool, scientific distance, as if it were the recording of an experiment. Looking at it, you can feel the excitement the artists must have felt while working. They didn’t know exactly how it would turn out, but they sensed the specialness of the piece and knew that it had soul.