“Things Will Be Different” is about two criminals, a brother and a sister, who commit crimes, use time travel to escape punishment and become trapped on a farm where a crime was committed and begin to feel imprisoned in purgatory. temporary. Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Michael Felker (who co-edited with Rebeca Marques, in a prismatic, non-linear style), it is an action thriller, a puzzle film, a relationship drama, and a sound and light spectacle, all at once. . Create a world with its own rules and tell a story in its own visual language. It seems like it will come to a very obvious conclusion, but then it pivots and introduces elements that create a new framework for the film. Fifteen minutes later, he does it again and again.
Not every element works: the film is better directed, edited, and acted than it is written, and you may hit the conceptual reset button one too many times, though of course your mileage will vary. But his mastery of tone and rhythm is remarkable, and there’s an understated confidence to everything that outweighs any specific complaints one might have.
It also embodies Pedro Almodóvar’s principle that films should not simply move; They should dance. There are three “time passing” montages that are among the best I’ve seen, and throughout, the cut creates tension not only with speed and noise but also with stagnation and silence. There isn’t much music on “Things Will Be Different.” Maybe ninety percent of it takes place with natural sound, that is, any sound that occurs naturally where the characters are, whether in a musty basement or a creepy forest. Movies that do this make you hyperaware of the squeak of a footstep on the ground or the distant sound of something (or someone?) advancing through the cornfield that borders the farmhouse, which is the main place in the story. This main set is explored so obsessively, with strategic repetitions, that it begins to feel like a cursed island of land on the American plains, a space that can seem figurative or real, depending on what’s happening in the story. (It’s not hard to imagine this story being remade as a play.)
Oh, of course: the story. It’s probably better if you don’t know everything because it’s fun to see where it goes, but also because, in the end, I think the movie cares less about logic and order than it does about feeling and pacing. I can tell you that Brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sister Sidney (Riley Dandy) arrive at the farm with rifles, chase away three men who have been loitering out front, and enter the farm to do something that goes against it. the law, and also against the laws of time and space, unless you are Christopher Nolan or Alain Resnais (“Last Year at Marienbad”). The premise I stated earlier (about this being a crime thriller in which the characters use time travel as a kind of cheat code) really only applies to the first ten or fifteen minutes. The story turns out to be bigger than that.
We began to receive fragments of the real story of Sidney and Joseph. They are not biological brothers. The story we are told makes Sidney seem like a ward who became a brother. But they have the intuitive, teasing energy of siblings, and when they move, they are like cats trained to kill by the same mother. They both carry rifles with telescopic sights and are skilled with them. Their relationship is at the center of everything, giving the film an emotional boost that helps it get through the toughest moments.
Thompson and Dandy are outstanding physical actors, not only in hand-to-hand combat and gunfight scenes, but also in quiet moments when they eat or talk about their past. And they have such a compelling chemistry that if the press releases told me they were real brothers, I wouldn’t question it. They step on each other’s words and anticipate each other’s reasoning, and sometimes during arguments, one of them gets so emotional that they cry, but only a little. You can tell that these people love each other with a primordial purity, which is exactly what you’d expect from the lead actors in a film with vigorous musicality, to the point that it feels driven rather than directed.
I often talk here about how cinema is more than a story or “content.” “Things will be different” is an excellent example. It’s about what happens to the characters and what it means to them and how all the pieces of the fragmented story come together in your mind in the end. But it is also about the feelings of these characters when they are faced with the reality of the unthinkable and strange facts of their situation. The film feels deeply identified with them. But it also maintains a cold scientific distance, as if it were the record of an experiment. When you look at it, you can feel the excitement that the artists must have felt while working on it, not knowing exactly how it would turn out, but feeling how special it was and knowing that it had soul.