Things Will Be Different

Fleeing the police after a robbery, a pair of siblings hide out in a mysterious farmhouse that transports them to a different time.

In October, I traveled to Trieste, Italy.

A port city in the far northeastern corner of Italy, Trieste is a mix of Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and Slovenian influences set hard up against the head of the Gulf of Trieste in the Adriatic Sea. Known as the “City of Coffee,” it was considered to be the end-point of the maritime leg of the famous trade route known as the Silk Road, and was an important deep-water port owned by the House of Habsburg, an aristocratic family that was as powerful as it was inbred. Now, it's just a nice little seaside city, and in October, it had a film festival called the Trieste Science Fiction Festival. While I was there, I saw several films.

Things Will Be Different was one of them.

After committing an armed robbery and ditching the police pursuit, brother and sister Joseph and Sidney rendezvous at a restaurant with $7m in tow. Their plan is to then hike through forests and cornfields and lie low at a remote farmhouse until the heat dies down. This farmhouse is a very special kind of safe house, one that guarantees the cops will not be able to find them.

The rambling old farmhouse sits in the center of fields of tall green corn. In an upstairs room of that farmhouse, they find a grandfather clock standing across from a closet. According to the instructions they received, if they use the clock and closet in conjunction correctly, they will be transported to an alternate timeline, or maybe it’s a few decades in the past, or maybe it's just a little bubble outside of time, a pocket dimension. Whatever it is, as the distant sirens close in, they follow the instructions, set the clock, and enter the closet. And when they exit, they find themselves still within the same farmhouse, but the sirens are gone. They are alone in the quiet little world of the farm. But while they have the run of the well-stocked main house, the other buildings are mysteriously locked. Also, they are confined to the boundaries of the farmyard. If they cross its edge, if they try to leave the grass and enter the cornfields, they will get violently sick, vomiting blood, bleeding from their nose, ears, and eyes. It's clear, if they stay out there, they will die.

But that’s all right, because they only intend to spend two weeks there, lying low.

Joseph settles in for the long haul, but Sidney is a little more reluctant, as back in the real world, her young daughter Steph is waiting. But they have nowhere to go, and two weeks to kill, so while using the farmhouse’s boardgames, VHS tapes, and CDs, the two long-estranged siblings spend their time reconnecting, and exploring old wounds that still lay open between them. After two weeks, things are actually not too bad between them. But when their time is up, they find that they can’t leave, as on the fourteenth day, the closet is suddenly barricaded.

That’s when things get weird.

…more weird.

Confused and angry, the siblings argue and storm off from each other. While Sidney explores the history of the house and its former owners through the old books and photos within it, Joseph discovers that the other buildings are now unlocked. Within one of those buildings, he finds a piece of paper that explains that the delicate balance of the farmhouse has been upset. It explains to him that someone else, a mysterious visitor, has entered this bubble they are in, or whatever it is, without the approval of the owners of the farmhouse, and as a result, the way out is closed, and now, they are all stuck there.

The paper asks that Joseph sign, signifying his understanding, and as soon as he does, a safe instantly appears. Within it, he finds a tape recorder, and he manages to figure out that, if he records a message, locks the tape recorder inside the safe, and then opens it again, the tape recorder will have a recorded response from a stranger, someone who seems to be the farmhouse’s owner.

The owner states that they intend to wipe Joseph and Sidney out of existence, to scrub this little bubble clean, in order to protect the farmhouse's abilities, unless... Joseph and Sidney agree to wait for and kill this mysterious and unwelcome new visitor when they arrive at the farmhouse at some unknown point in the future.

A year passes.

A year of verdant cornfields, a year of barren windswept fields, a year of endless stretches of blowing snow, all of it trapped on this cursed little farm in the middle of the American heartland.

I can't say for sure whether or not there's an intended metaphor here, as the two siblings get meaner and angrier, hunkered down over their guns, unable to leave this dirtpatch middle of nowhere isolated hell, waiting for some mysterious other to show up and attack them, but... one could certainly read one there, if one were so inclined…

Anyway, when the mysterious visitor finally arrives, masked and hooded, there’s a shootout.

Sidney is wounded and holes up in the house. Joseph is wounded, and the visitor takes him to the safe. Unable to speak, the visitor writes down for Joseph that they are looking for the man who killed their family. They force Joseph to communicate by tape recorder with the farmhouse’s owners and tell them he’s killed the visitor. But then Sidney shows up and fights the visitor, unmasking them in the process, and in the confusion of the reveal, Joseph accidentally shoots and kills Sidney.

The balance of the farmhouse restored, the visitor escapes through the closet door. Joseph, now alone, uses the tape recorder to inform the owners that the visitor has left, and after burying Sidney, he is transported to a strange place where a man and woman wait for him, the farmhouse’s owners. They push for information about the visitor, but Joseph doesn’t know anything, as he missed the reveal of the visitor’s face. Disappointed, the owners prepare to erase him from the timeline, but he begs for a chance to travel back, to save Sidney, and fix his mistakes. The owners agree and transport Joseph back to the day right before his arrival at the farmhouse.

Back once again at the restaurant from the beginning of the film, we see a much older and much more haggard Joseph. It is clear he has repeated this time loop many times, and that it has been a very long time since we last saw him pleading for a chance to save Sidney, and that he has made many attempts since then, attempts that very clearly haven't panned out.

And so, worn out and exhausted, when Sidney arrives at the restaurant, the police sirens getting closer and closer, Joseph tells her there is only one way left for them to break the cycle...

I have an ever-growing backlog of reviews that I've slowly been catching up on, plus, y’know… the world has ended. Also I saw this film in October, so at this point, I'd have to rewatch this film if I really wanted to nail down all of the film's specific narrative issues for you, of which it has a few.

I didn’t do that. Plus, if I’m being honest, I’m not really all that interested in a second viewing. Take that as you will. Also, I don't want to be too specific, because after all, Things Will Be Different is a mystery film, and I don't want to ruin some of the key moments.

My main feelings, as the credits rolled, was that two or three very important moments in this story were skipped over, or were sped too quickly past. Things Will Be Different is basically a time travel heist film, which means it’s a puzzle film, and once you start trying to arrange and order all the pieces of what you know, you very quickly realize that not all of the pieces seem to be meant for the same puzzle, and even if you force them all together in a kind of semblance of order, there's still a couple of big holes in the picture. And that’s too bad, because Things Will Be Different is definitely an "almost great" film.

Almost, but not quite.

This is mostly due to the fact that Things Will Be Different loses its narrative coherence by the end, mostly because it is simply trying too hard to be twisty-turny clever within its doubling-back nonlinear story structure. This is a common pitfall when it comes to time travel shenanigans movies. It’s just not easy to make a good time travel plot that completely works, and most attempts fail.

This is what happened here.

But also, it does seem like too-heavy a hand in the editing suite is to blame too. Someone cut too much, and way too deep, and probably for no other reason than time concerns, and that’s bullshit, because this film is only an hour and forty-two minutes long. I don’t know for sure that this is what happened, but I do know that there’s a camp amongst filmmakers and fans, a loud and strident cult of assholes who think that, instead of simply letting a film have the time it needs to tell its tale, any movie over 90 minutes is too long. This is a ridiculous load of idiot nonsense obviously, the kind of opinion you will get from people with their heads too far up their own asses, who are too deep into their own little niche world, and much like when someone complains about sex scenes in films simply because they exist, it’s so tedious. Could that be what happened here, were these cuts the result of some arbitrary mandate from a dipshit occupying the kind of power position allowing them to force their will upon the film? I don’t know. But I do know that an extra fifteen minutes or so might have made all the difference here between “fine” and "great.”

Either way, it’s too bad, because otherwise, this story about a pair of sibling criminals using a time travel farmhouse to hide out and escape punishment, but end up getting trapped in a temporal purgatory, is pretty cool.

And Things Will be Different is definitely ambitious. And for the most part, it’s well made, especially for an otherwise pretty bare bones lo-fi time-travel crime thriller/action film/sci-fi mystery/relationship drama. I like how the title can be read like a promise of change, or the hope of overcoming past mistakes, or maybe just the all-too-human need for second chances. It’s a mostly pretty clever film, and the cast, which is mostly just the two siblings, are completely capable of carrying the story. It's good work all around.

It just... gets up it's own ass a little too much.

And as I said, there seems to be some important chunks missing from the film.

And that's ultimately the film's big problem.

Because those missing chunks are much needed moments, moments that would have better and more clearly explained what the farmhouse is, where it came, how it is connected to the siblings, and most importantly, what exactly was going on in the climax and denouement. From a high-level vantage point, for the most part, it all works. At least, kind of. And that's the problem. The "kind of" part. Those "kind of" parts stick out, and make you go "But, wait, how did…" and then, once you start to look closer, it all falls apart.

For a small example, while Joseph and Sidney are in their little dimensional bubble, they are confined to the property. There is a border along its edges. It's red, and the movie seems to imply that it's made of blood, but... why?

I can't make it make sense.

If it's the blood of those who have tried to escape before... first off, why are they trying to escape? The film seems to imply that, barring the entry of an unwanted person, which is what happened here, and is seemingly not common, most of the time when someone uses the farmhouse, they just make their arrangements with the management, stay a couple of weeks, and then leave. Easy-peesy. So why would anyone be trying to escape? And that there has apparently been so many who have tried that there is now enough blood to line the entire perimeter of the farmyard? Why? To me—"There's a border of blood that is all that's left of people who tried to escape"—is probably just a precious little darling that should’ve been killed off, a leftover idea from a previous version of the script that was an entirely different beast altogether, and even though it should’ve been, it was never cut during rewrites.

Maybe. Who knows.

Then there's a part where Sidney is trying to piece together the history of the house, where it came from, why it can do what it does, and who the people who owned it are, and maybe most importantly, how the house is connected to her and Joseph, which seems to be implied, and yet… the whole sequence felt cut up, or completely cut out. I don't know. I got nothing from it. Certainly no answers, not even a bunch of technobabble nonsense. It was more like a half-formed thought that was never completed. Instead of background or context, it’s a weird moment that adds nothing to the film except to make the water needlessly murkier. And it's too bad, because even if you don't provide the full history—and you certainly don’t have to explain everything—“what the hell is this weird farmhouse” is definitely the kind of story question that you should provide the audience with at least a little bit of an answer, just a little bit, especially as it felt like it was supposed to be directly tied to the whole question of the film, who the house’s owners were, and why the mysterious visitor was doing what they were doing.

But we never get the whole picture, just glimpses, and not enough at that.

Then, at one point in the film, it becomes clear that Sidney and Joseph aren’t biological brother and sister. It's unclear what they really are, maybe Sidney was adopted or fostered and eventually became a sibling, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure why they would even bother to make this distinction in the story, as the characters seem like they are “true” siblings, blood-related or not, and the actors look enough alike to believably be related even, and maybe most importantly, the fact that they may or may not “technically” be siblings seems wholly irrelevant to the story. So... why even bother implying they're not "blood related" siblings? On top of that, why bother implying it so half-assedly, and then dropping the idea completely?

I don’t get it.

Plus, why would you focus on the fact that they both have the same tattoo, especially when it resembles a Venn diagram, and then not explain why they decided to get them, or even the significance of the dual tattoo’s design. That it looks like a Venn Diagram is the kind of thing that right away makes the murky implication of "overlapping" which could not only apply to their relationship, but also to the whole time-travel thing that is central to the movie? Why not give at least some context?

These weren’t the only issues, of course. There were bigger ones, ones I won’t go into because of the spoilers, but this is a good representative cross-section of the film’s issues. All of which leaves me with questions. How could the filmmakers not notice these holes? And if they were the results of heavy cuts, how could they allow these particular moments to be cut, as mostly, they all seem to be the main meat of the story? How could they not be interested in explaining these things more? How could they not see that they’re important moments? Even if they didn’t intend to fully explain what‘s going on, then why would they not want to explain things at least somewhat? I don’t get it.

In the end, the way the film almost makes sense, but then doesn't upon closer examination, makes for a frustrating viewing experience. While watching, you're often left wondering how exactly characters know certain things, or why they are doing other things. And you assume it will all make sense later, because that’s how time travel stories work, but that turns out not to be the case. That’s disappointing, because otherwise, the film’s generally got a lot going for it.

While more akin to Nolan’s puzzling snoozer, Tenet, than it is to Rian Johnson’s more straightforward but equally as blasé about its rules, Looper, the bottom line is, when you make a twisting-turning-doubling back time travel story, in the end, when you put all the story’s events in order—which we definitely tried to do while sitting outside of Bianco Burger on Viale 20 Settembre, steps from the Politeama Rossetti—it just has to work.

And Things Will Be Different just doesn't.

All this isn't to imply that the film was bad. It's a disappointing in the end, sure, but it's a fun ride, and pretty well done. The whole safe/tape recorder idea is pretty good and a great mechanism for tension. There's a 360-degree pan montage as the year passes that takes us through the changing seasons which is a pretty cool shot too. Overall, this film shows a lot of potential, and I would be interested in seeing more from debut Writer/Director Michael Felker.

So, yeah... even if this film stumbles over its own feet a bit here, it makes a game attempt of trying to walk the line between low budget/high concept with a heaping helping of human drama. The fact that it almost sticks the landing is laudable.

It’s worth checking out, but maybe don't plan your night around it.