Director – Michael Felker – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 102m
****
A brother and sister go through a portal into the past, are trapped there by an unseen adversary, and must wait for a mysterious visitor – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 4th
This movie is different. It’s about philosophical ideas. It would work very well as a piece of writing (a short story? a novella?), it would work as a radio drama, and – yes – it works very well as a movie. Because what’s compelling about it is not what you see with your eyes or hear with your ears, it’s the implications of it all, the stuff that goes through your head as you’re watching the movie. Welcome to the Cinema of Ideas.
Early one bright and sunny Summer morning, Sidney (Riley Dandy) enters the diner where her brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson), who she’s not seen for a while, is having breakfast. She has the rifle. He has the two bags with the money. As arranged, they go through the woods, across the high cornfields towards the house. There are people in the woods, which are supposed to be deserted. She is concerned. Crossing the cornfields, they hear shots: there are people at the house shooting clay pigeons. She counts One Alabama, Two Alabama, up to Five Alabama, then uses her gun to tell them to get off her land. Her brother backs her up. It works.
They enter the abandoned farmhouse, where a number of clocks are set to about 2:10. He resets the clocks according to precise instructions. They go upstairs and wait for the door to release. Eventually it does and they go through. Inside is a dark place: the door is some sort of portal. Eventually, they find their way to another farmhouse resembling the one they came from, except that here it appears to be Winter. He explains that they can hide out here for 14 days, after which they can go back and things should have cooled off in the other place. She’s fine with this as it’s been a long time, and she wants some brother and sister time.
They do a certain amount of spending time together – hanging around the house or sitting fully clothed in the empty bathtub chatting about this and that. Including parents. She knew their mum, he knew their dad. Between them, she points out, they could be a normal family. She wants to trade memories. He feels guilty for abandoning her when she was 24, but she doesn’t see it that way, and besides, she has Steff – not six as he wrongly remembers but 10. She remembers a CD that mum used to play. There’s a CD that she plays a lot, seemingly one track:
Watching seconds fall / Like grains of sand / Clock ticking loudly / Echoes in my brain…
(Eventually, after she’s played this one too many times, he’ll snap the CD in two. Quite literally, a broken memory.)
Day 12. She has been finding documents around the house, and is filling in gaps about their parents. Whose home, we now realise, this was.
Day 14. They are packed and ready to go. But something has happened. A sign is scratched on the plank nailed across the door: “Go to the mill.” They do so, navigating the mill’s dark interior by torchlight. In a church interior, they find a decayed corpse sitting next to a dias, atop which is a board bearing the message scratched into its surface: “You are in the grip of the Vice. Between the Right Hand and the Left Hand. Sign here to comply.” After some indecision, leaving the Mill and returning to it, they sign. They must open a safe and speak into a handheld cassette recorder to set a cycle, then lock the device inside the safe then remove it in order to communicate with the Vice, using the pause and play buttons like the send and receive of a walkie-talkie.
By communicating on the device, they learn that someone else is coming, someone who shouldn’t be there, and they must wait for the visitor and destroy them when they appear. Then the Vice will let them return to the world they came from…
So, they must wait…
To reveal more would spoil the film. All this and what follows – and I couldn’t see where it was going – is fascinating in terms of the two siblings as elements of their past, particularly hers, come slowly to light. And then there are the dual matters of the visitor and the Vice. You absolutely believe the house they’re in as somewhere they knew in the past that they’ve come to from the future, while the Vice would appear to be somewhere in the future farther along in time than the point they came from. The is also a constant threat of the Vice having the power to ‘wipe’ one or both siblings should they refuse to help, or even fail in the attempt to do so.
The portal is a strange concept. Obviously it works in the narrative as a portal – it is what it is – yet the house might not simply be a familiar place in the past, but also a trip to the unconscious memory. And if the mysterious stranger is returning to the house, do they know the brother or the sister? Are they a friend, or a relative? What is their motive? The Vice describes them in terms of a trespasser or a threat. But can the Vice be trusted? “You have our word,” it says at one point via the tape recorder. And that has to be enough. Because what other choice do Sid or Joe have?
Or perhaps the house is a picture of life, when people have plans and somehow get stuck somewhere they didn’t intend to be, and find they have no way out.
It’s a difficult film to pigeonhole. You certainly could class it as fantasy, horror or science fiction, but none of those quite do it justice. Equally, you could class it as a family or sibling drama, and it has elements of the crime movie too. But none of these descriptions seem quite right. Two of its executive producers are Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (The Endless, 2017), which alone is a reason to see it. Like their films, it is mind-bending.
It’s a strange, enigmatic movie which will stay with you long after the credits have rolled. I’m writing this immediately after viewing, and I’m sure that it’s a movie I’ll return to in my head and think about a lot. No doubt it will slowly reveal further secrets over time. It’s going to be an interesting journey.
Things Will Be Different is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 4th.
Trailer: