Things Will Be Different review – time travel thriller as a robber tries to escape with the money | Film

Writer-director Michael Felker makes his feature debut with this ploddingly bleak sci-fi, an eerily realistic time-travel film about a pair of criminals hiding out in the future; it’s a bit in the vein of Shane Carruth’s Primer or Rian Johnson’s Looper – albeit without the tension, and without the concussions and ingenious plot contrivances where that tension would otherwise go. It’s produced by filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who put a kind of authorial stamp on this kind of indie-hipster cosmic fantasy with their own (more interesting) film The Endless.

Things Will Be Different is about a dour, bearded drug dealer named Joseph (Adam David Thompson) who reconnects with his sister, single mother Sidney (Riley Dandy), from whom he has long been estranged after their troubled childhood. He’s committed some heist and is in possession of a bag full of millions of dollars; he meets Sidney who wants a better life for herself and her daughter, a future where things will be different. So Joseph offers to let Sidney enjoy this new bonanza, but first they will have to hide together for a fortnight in a remote farm that one of his clients told him about. It’s a dusty, creepy place where, if you follow the secret procedure on the old-fashioned dial telephone and change the time on the hands of the various grandfather clocks, you are transported 14 days into the future (albeit in the same place), after which you can come back when the heat has subsided.

Inevitably, after a very long montage-like portrayal of their sedate lives in this rural time bubble, things go horribly wrong on day 14 and they are stranded in mortal danger, but also have to endure a lot of boredom and Beckettian futility. (When “Day 352” appears on screen, you feel like you’ve been through it right along with them.) Over time, they must communicate with the shadowy figures in charge through a laborious method involving a tape machine attached to a chain is used. a hermitage in a mill (separate from the house) which houses a dimly lit chapel. Despite an intriguing, high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting redundancies mean it never really emerges from its self-imposed slowness and dreariness.