Things Will Be Different review - lost in the past

Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.

There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (Riley Dandy, pictured below), cinematographer Carissa Dorson capturing Seventies New Hollywood’s elegiac glow. Joseph has just robbed a bank in the present day, and effects an unlikely getaway through a nearby farmhouse’s previously rumbled time-portal, letting the pair hide in the past till the heat dies down.

What seems a sure-fire bolthole in Fifties Nebraska proves a place of wintry exile, a Midwest twilight zone with a population of two. Joseph robbed the bank to secure his niece’s future, guilty redress for leaving his sister with their late mum – an ominous presence in a film fragmented, Nic Roeg-like, with memories and bloody portent. A boozy, bonding fortnight watching Ike-era TV in their weird Airbnb is brought to a juddering halt by its god-like owners, who use a cassette-player to inform the interlopers they will be slaughtered unless they wait for and kill a third party heading their way.

The camera’s slow spin sees the seasons turn in this eerie wormhole “Nebraska”. Its empty plains’ cosmic dread recalls Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Lovecraftian slacker films (the apartment-bound Something in the Dirt [2022], for instance), and the pair executive produce, with Benson cameoing as a stoner god and Moorhead handling visual effects. Rian Johnson’s time-warped Looper (2012) is another acknowledged forebear.

Things Will Be Different rests on its siblings’ fraying but real love. Dandy embodies Sidney’s fierce sharpness, forged by family resentments which leave Joseph a handwringing mess. “I just want to go home,” he declares with simple feeling, before she takes charge of an ennui-jolting shootout. Jimmy LaValle and Michael A. Muller’s post-rock synth and cello score meanwhile deepens the melancholy.

The sense of yawning gaps in the scarily wide open fields and skies is reflected in logic and budget holes as Felker’s yarn progresses, though he also withholds solutions, knowing mystery offers more, in an enigmatic calling-card.

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