Things Will Be Different is, possibly, the funniest and most self-aware title a time travel story could have. Bitter irony aside, it’s a title that gets straight to the heart of nearly all time travel tales. Yes, things certainly will be different. Most likely, things will be much worse, if we’ve learned anything at all from the movies. Coming from the Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (who serve as producers here) school of low-budget, high-concept sci-fi, Things Will Be Different is a heady piece of business.
The unwitting time-hoppers at the center of the story are Sidney (Riley Dandy) and Joseph (Adam David Thompson). Fresh off a robbery, the sister and brother duo’s attempt to hide from the law leads them to an abandoned farmhouse. It quickly becomes clear that Sidney and Joseph’s hideout serves a far grander purpose. Not only that, but someone is keeping tabs on them and has designs of their own.
Sidney and Joseph set about the usual time travel business: finding clues and scraps of information with which to piece together, while hiding from authorities. Oh, and there’s a pesky sniper outside the farmhouse trying to take them out. Dandy and Thompson give lively performances full of desperation and disorientation. For as dense as the story can feel at times, they help ground the film and keep everything held together.
Writer-director Michael Felker guides the film with a strong hand visually and thematically. The writing is taut, with the script bringing together the technical aspects of the premise alongside the constantly shifting dynamic between Joseph and Sidney. The direction has a similar rigidity. Despite only using a couple of locations, Felker frequently finds ways to keep the imagery from becoming repetitive. Comparisons to other low-budget time travel (or time travel adjacent) films like Timecrimes, Coherence, Safety Not Guaranteed are inevitable. Things Will Be Different earns its spot among those films and plenty others.
