Things Will Be Different

22

There is something distinctly throw-back about Things Will be Different. If you consider the 90s to be “back.” A clearly independent film that uses sci-fi as its base, but doesn’t feel the need to really explain the science, nor really show it. Some of it is due to budgetary restraints I imagine, but there is a challenge in creating something high-concept and a little bit mind-bending through purely practical means. Limitations that these types of films saw as a plus and something to embrace rather than something to overcome through trickery or rickety effects. If you’ve ever seen a Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (the duo exec produced this movie and Benson shows up as a character in the film), you will recognize its mixture of sci-fi thriller, psychological sci-fi and creeping horror it employs. All couched in this kind of DIY film school package.

This movie is, around the edges, a heist film. Albeit a heist that we don’t see and know nothing about. We only know that it is perhaps a bank heist — but perhaps not — and that siblings, Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sydney (Riley Dandy), get away just ahead of the cops. There is no indication in the movie as to how much their haul is — at least none that I recall — but the Internet tells me it’s supposed to be seven million. We’re given the sense the siblings had been involved in some low-level shenanigans as youths, but now Sydney needs this money to help raise her young daughter. Which you’d think would be like forging $2,000 checks, not robbing someone or something for seven mil. Because, why does a single mom need that much money to raise a kid? And Joseph, from what we can tell, is either a bartender or owns a bar and seems to be fine. So, why? Why do this? And, honestly, how would either of them come into contact with anything that would have millions up for grabs? This is never explained and never explored, which is problematic. Like movie-killingly problematic from jump.

Also, I don’t believe Sydney is a mom. There’s nothing motherly or mom-like about the actress or character. If her daughter, Steph, is supposed to be the motivating force behind all of what comes, I don’t buy it. It’s both unbelievable and not written into the fabric of the script in any convincing way. Putting all of my feelings aside about driving forces and catalysts all that stuff that makes narratives run, I will move on to the concept here. The plot device that makes this movie chug. And that is time travel. Or multiverse hopping. Again, it’s a little unclear. But, through some mysterious bar patron, Joseph is given a map to a lonely farmhouse that contains a closet that can transfer its occupants to an alternative timeline if they do some incantations and whatnot once locked inside. The plan being that they steal the money (again from who and where is never disclosed), run to this house, go into an alternative timeline for a couple weeks using the closet as the time machine and then go back in and emerge back into their own timeline once the heat has died down. I think. Putting aside the asinine nature of the whole thing and the filmmaker’s failure to explain just about anything in the mechanism here, I just went with it. Even when the characters are running around the house playing with the hands on grandfather clocks for some reason.

The thing here is that this should have been it. This should be a short story. It has that literary feeling of a Stephen King or Ray Bradbury tale in a book of short tales. Ones where the conceit is just chalked up to magic or supernatural or in some way unimportant in the larger scheme of things. Though I suppose King wrote 11.22.63 about a magic time traveling portal in a diner pantry. But, even in that case, the 850-page novel and eight-episode series based on it, had the Kennedy assassination and other national events at its end. This film gives you the mechanism, has our protagonists exit the closet into a world with absolutely nothing going on and then just kind of points its nose toward a twist with nothing in between. No, this could have been a taught story a la Bradbury’s sci-fi short The Veldt, which topped out at 4,775 words. Instead, we’re treated to what I think the writer tried to turn into a family drama buried smack dab in the middle of a twisty sci-fi tale. And it just doesn’t work. Once the siblings realize that whatever they thought was going to happen isn’t going to happen in two weeks, we see them sit on the porch in the freezing cold drinking the bottomless bottles of bourbon scene after scene. We see them fight about past slights. We see them get to know each other after being estranged for years because they are the only two in this universe and are bound by the magical barrier of the farmhouse. Which, again, goes unexplained and is clumsily executed. All of the scenes, again, just seem like them spinning their wheels and wasting time until they can get to the ending action and the twist. Which is why it feels like a much shorter experience would have served this story much better. Get in, get out, twist, done.

This is usually where I’d nitpick all the little time travel stuff and whatnot that didn’t align or make sense. I’m not going to do that here, though, because the whole thing is honestly an exercise in just going with it. Because, when you start honing in on the details, this thing unravels pretty quickly. Never mind the magical time travel closet, the unexplained heist and even the fact these supposedly estranged siblings get together to pull a heist that the sister is told ends in the aforementioned magical closet. And she — who we learn has serious trust issues with her estranged brother — just believes him for no apparent reason? Sure, we haven’t talked in years, I now have a daughter I love and support and, yeah, I’ll totally pull a robbery with you and we’ll get away by going to a house that will transport us to another dimension. Sign me up! Sounds unlikely, right? Okay, I said I wasn’t going to do this, so I won’t. But suffice it to say that it’s pretty easy to poke holes in the time travel logic and motivations throughout this thing. But I guess if you just go more with the “everything is magic” excuse, then you can make anything work. Ultimately, I didn’t at all hate this film, but was often confused by it. Like I paused it, cocked my head to see if I could suss it out, and then just decided to hit play again because I realized there was no untangling that which doesn’t really connect from point A to point B.