‘Things Will Be Different’ Review: A Time-Travel Thriller with a Twist

Writer-director Michael Felker’s lo-fi sci-fi thriller starts in fleet-footed fashion, with its two main characters already on the run. They meet up at a diner toting a pair of rifles and bags full of cash, then head out into the woods and change their clothes before moving on to their ultimate destination, a remote farmhouse where they intend to hole up. Things Will Be Different whisks us briskly through this opening, using the clipped conversations between the duo to tell us everything we really need to know about them.

Sidney (Riley Dandy) and Joseph (Adam David Thompson) are siblings who’ve been out of each other’s lives for some time, though they still seem to trust one another enough to become partners in crime. Sidney has a daughter to raise and Joseph has a bar to run, so they’re both badly in need of a payday. Like many great sci-fi stories, Things Will Be Different takes a tale that had all the makings of a compelling, realistic narrative—smart pacing, a sense of place and characters who emerge into full view after only a few lines of dialogue—and then throws an otherworldly wrinkle into the middle of it just to see how everyone reacts.

In this case, that element is a special door inside the farmhouse that allows Sidney and Joseph to slip outside of the usual flow of time. The particulars of time travel in Things Will Be Different—like the way that the door is operated using a pair of grandfather clocks or the notebook full of hand-written instructions that Joseph follows when using it—give the whole thing a tactile quality. It takes on the eerie power of a superstition or an urban legend, the sense of a supernatural reality just beyond our own—one we could access if only we knew the trick, like saying a name three times into a mirror or setting the hands on a pair of clocks just right.

The only downside to Sidney and Joseph’s plan is that they have to stay at the farmhouse for two weeks before they can make the return trip. They’re pretty happy to do so, getting reconnected and whiling away the days in a haze of sour mash whiskey and bursts of laughter. But then messages start to appear, suggesting that the two of them aren’t the only ones playing with the flow of time—and that the other travelers might not play well with others.

This development allows the film to play with time in clever way, from objects suddenly popping into existence (usually accompanied by an extremely satisfying “thump” sound) to conversations held across time using a shared Dictaphone. In many ways, Felker’s film feels like a micro-budget rendition of Tenet, as our heroes discover that they’ve been caught in a “vice-grip” between past and future that functions much like that film’s famous “temporal pincer.”

Because it can’t rely on that sort of large-scale, effects-driven visual spectacle to bring its ideas to life, Things Will Be Different has to get creative. The tension rises as the siblings wait for another time traveler to arrive, hoping that this will provide them with a way home while growing increasingly unsure about how much they can really trust one another. There’s a slight lull as the film makes the transition from sci-fi-tinged sibling drama to a paranoid thriller before finally becoming a full-blown action flick. But the ending is such a doozy that it more than makes up for any momentum that was lost in getting there.