Things Will Be Different

It’s an unconventional and uncomfortable reunion for siblings Joseph and Sidney at an anonymous diner in a small town a hundred miles out of Detroit, he trying to make amends for what he feels was abandoning her years before when she needed him most, a hold-all of cash at his feet and police after him, but a chance for both to escape and make good with the money if they move fast through the forest and across the cornfields to the abandoned house.

The patterns of light filtering through the windows over the wooden floors, the clocks all stopped at the same moment, the sirens of pursuit are close as they follow the instructions and step through the door into darkness then out into the silence of a different season; planning to return to their own time after two weeks when the heat has cooled, the unseen authority which controls the safe house first requires their complete cooperation in another matter which has arisen.

An ouroboros of hopes and thwarted possibility which marks the directorial debut of writer Michael Felker, Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy star as the anxious and increasingly frustrated siblings who had hoped that Things Will Be Different, the plan of a perfect escape to another time colliding with the realisation that nothing comes for free, and that an unusual arrangement will come with an equally unorthodox price attached, and not one which can be paid in cash.

With Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead listed as producers and also appearing in cameos, Things Will Be Different echoes their own oddities and paradoxes of people trapped in impossible situations, The Endless and Synchronic, and there are also echoes of Looper and Predestination in the isolated homestead and wide-open fields, circumstance creating an inescapable dilemma for the prisoners regardless of the absence of any physical walls.

The farmhouse an anachronism, apparently frozen in time, Sid theorises while Joe becomes cynical, their planned fourteen days of killing time stretching to a year while they await the visitor whose arrival has been foretold who then proceeds to taunts Sid with music from her childhood, adding credence to the belief that they are pawns manipulated remotely in a game they don’t understand being played on a board whose dimensions they cannot imagine.

Their instructions relayed through a tape recorder, the rules of their situation only apparent when they are broken and inevitably working against them, with Joe building a shrine around the safe where their only means of communication is held it is as though the controllers are a godlike force over them, prayer as likely as any other method of mediating change when the slim chance that things will be different is insufficient to support any lasting faith.

Things Will Be Different is on limited release from Friday 4th October and will be available on digital download from Monday 18th November

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