Writer-director Michael Felker makes his feature debut with this trudgingly downbeat sci-fi, an uncanny-realist time travel movie about a couple of criminals hiding out in the future; it’s a little in the style of Shane Carruth’s Primer or Rian Johnson’s Looper – though without the thrills, and without the cerebral frissons and ingenious plot contrivances where those thrills would otherwise go. It is produced by film-makers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who established a kind of authorial stamp on this kind of indie hipster-cosmic fantasy with their own (more interesting) film The Endless.
Things Will Be Different is about a dour and bearded drug dealer called Joseph (Adam David Thompson) who reconnects with his sister, single-mom Sidney (Riley Dandy), from whom he has long been estranged after their troubled childhood. He has pulled off some kind of robbery or con and is in possession of a bag full of millions of dollars; he meets up with Sidney who wants a better life for herself and her daughter, a future in which things will be different. So Joseph offers to let Sidney in on this new bonanza, but first they will have to hide out together for 14 days in a remote farmhouse that one of his clients has told him about. It’s a dusty, eerie place where, if you follow the secret procedure on its old-fashioned dialler phone and alter the time on the hands of its various grandfather clocks, you will be transported 14 days into the future (though in the same place), after which you can come back when the heat has died down.
Inevitably, after a very long montage-type depiction of their calm life in this rural time bubble, things go terribly wrong on Day 14 and they are stranded in mortal danger, but also enduring much boredom and Beckettian futility. (When “Day 352” flashes up on screen, you’ll feel like you’ve lived through it with them.) They have to communicate across time with the shadowy figures in control via a laborious method involving a tape machine on a chain in a safe in a mill (separate from the house) which houses a crepuscular chapel. Despite an intriguing high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting superfluities mean that it never really emerges from its self-imposed inertia and gloom.