Director: Michael Felker
Writer: Michael Felker
Stars: Adam David Thompson, Riley Dandy, Chloe Skoczen
Synopsis: In order to escape police after a robbery, two estranged siblings lay low in a farmhouse that hides them away in a different time. There they reckon with a mysterious force that pushes their familial bonds to unnatural breaking points.
Joseph (Adam David Thompson) let his sister Sidney (Riley Dandy) down years ago when he abandoned her after she was arrested. Years later, he comes back into her life with a strange but foolproof plan. Commit a robbery and disappear through time in a house derelict and abandoned in the present but used as gateway getaway in the past to lay low. Sid is in debt with her pawn shop, and she has a young daughter, Steph, to support. As outlandish as it sounds, she’s willing to give Joseph the benefit of the doubt and meets with him at a diner to quietly skip ‘time’ and suspicion. The deal is fourteen days whenever they will be and then they return to their new cashed up lives.
Writer/director Michael Felker is best known for his work editing Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s features Something in the Dirt and The Endless and his debut feature has some hallmarks of Moorhead and Benson’s twistier and grounded indie science fiction masterworks. A general acceptance that the realm the characters enter is possible, probably, or simply factual. Time and dimensional travel exist. The mysteries inside the mystery are more potent.
Heading through cornfields, Joe and Sid find the derelict house. They are armed ready for anything they might encounter along the way, and prepared to perform the ritual given to Joe by one of his contacts he met through his bar. Clock hands are moved, a rotary telephone is dialed, and a door opens. The siblings are transported through time to the same house, but it is now over thirty years in the past and the house is clean and the refrigerator refills. The days pass and Joe and Sid begin to heal their fractured relationship. As the date moves towards their exit time something happens – they find they are trapped by the Gyre. They must remain in the house to stop an unwanted visitor intent on using the portal. There is no escape. They will either be ‘reset’ and removed from time entirely, or they stay and do what the disembodied voices known as the left and right vise command from two cassette tapes.
Sid is desperate to get back to Stephanie. She runs to the edge of the property to get some help from whatever time period they’re in, but the vise and the gyre have them in their hold. They can’t go past a certain radius on the property without becoming violently incapacitated. They can’t re-open the portal. The gyres cannot be reasoned with. They must kill the unwanted visitor to escape, but seasons pass and there is no visitor. Sid becomes convinced that they are being slowly tortured by sadists. The bond which began to reform between Sid and Joe disintegrates as he descends into a deep depression and she into an obsession to find out the mysteries of the house. They have been told a cycle has been set in motion, but what is it? What is happening if nothing seems to happen at all?
Felker works with an extraordinary concept; the inescapable and inexorable house set in a malleable time. When Sid tries to connect the history of the house (expertly and uncannily decorated by production and art designers Zach Thomas and Brennan Huizinga) to find some reasoning behind it, she doesn’t notice something subtly specific about when she and Joe are placed. It is a place which could be a new version of their childhood if either of them had properly shared one. Sid barely recalls her mother. Joe left Sid with their father. He feels responsible for leaving her too many times in her life. If only things were different. They did share a closeness, a time where they were the only people keeping each other afloat as signified by a matching tattoo.
Things Will Be Different is a mournful and melancholy piece of science fiction rooted in loss compounded over years. Joe believes he can make the difference to save Sidney and give her the life he feels his actions have denied her, but an entropic force keeps them bound within the real and ‘unreal’.
Michael Felker’s debut feature is polished and sophisticated, with beautiful cinematography by Carissa Dorson and music by Jimmy Lavelle who performs under the moniker ‘The Album Leaf’. Riley Dandy and Adam David Thompson carry the film with their performances as siblings. Riley Dandy’s strength and vulnerability is a highlight. Things Will Be Different is intelligent and emotionally mature science fiction. Michael Felker is one to watch.
