Michael Felker’s debut movie, Things Will Be Different, is billed as “A Felker Film”, which is ominously grandiose. But things are indeed different here and Felker emerges as a writer/director you might term an auteur, which is what the whole Felker Film thing is suggesting, right?
Most movies don’t operate like Felker’s film. They set out a proposition and then work their way through it for us. Here, Felker drops us into something and makes us do the mental lifting for ourselves.
After introducing us to two people at a remote diner, both with rifles, both looking hunted, he essentially asks us to ask a whole bunch of questions. Who are these people Joseph and Sidney? Why are they meeting like strangers when they say they are brother and sister? Later, at a remote location that’s also introduced with no real explanation, more questions. Are Joseph and Sidney really travelling back in time by turning the hands on a few old clock dials? And if so, why?
It seems probable that they are time-travelling thieves who might have done this sort of thing before. It seems fairly certain that this time things haven’t quite gone the way they planned and that instead of hiding away in this out-of-the-way farmhouse for a couple of weeks – until the heat dies down in “our present”, as Joseph terms it – Sidney and her brother are stuck there.
Eventually things take a turn when they get roped into working as lookouts for a disembodied voice, who has told Joseph and Sidney that they are there to neutralise an intruder who will turn up out of the blue at some time in the future. If there’s no kill, then they will not exit from this purgatory.
Simple, simple, simple stuff, beneath the plot chicanery and smoke and mirrors, done with a couple of actors (and eventually one more), on a simple set. No real sci-fi stuff, no real CGI, no visits from extra-terrestrials. The communication with whoever is pulling Sidney and Joseph’s strings is done via messages scrawled on bits of wood, or recordings on an analogue tape recorder.
Things Will Be Different is two-thirds of the way towards being an arthouse sci-fi movie. Felker gives us shots that are frames within frames and his images have a rigorous starkness to them, but he keeps its feet on the ground with some more everyday touches – some beauty shots, plus a couple of chances for the actors, Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy, to flex – which Dandy seizes with both hands, while resisting Thompson’s promptings to overdo it a bit.
It’s tempting to see it as a reworking of Waiting for Godot, though Felker has cited Looper (time-travel paradoxes) and Blood Simple (the twists) as reference points, though the IMDb trivia page also suggests that the tattoos on Joseph and Sidney’s wrists are “likely” references to Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, which whooshed over my head (if true).
Felker does a lot of his storytelling with montages, which helps keep the pace moving, and the score plays ambiguous genre games, never quite telling us definitively that this is sci-fi. Horror? Mystery thriller?
By shooting the house that Joseph and Sidney are stuck in as warm and super cosy, Felker also disorients us. By the end of his movie he’s suggesting home-invasion movie with a sci-fi twist. Or a bog-standard horror with all the trimmings. There’s even a final girl, though a twist comes with that too.
There are quite a few twists, in fact, which Felker mostly reserves for the last third, when things double back on themselves a few times and the energy is pumped up a couple of notches and the writer/director starts unveiling the time-travel paradoxes that the stans love to argue over. It’s a good ending, simultaneously satisfying and thought-provoking. A good high-concept movie.
Things Will Be Different – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
