Things Will Be Different
“Things Will Be Different” tells the story of two siblings, who constantly commit felonies, jump time, get stuck to a farmhouse where a crime has already occurred, and begin to feel like they are serving a sentence in some form of timeless hell (though a very strange one). Finnish filmmaker Michael Felker makes his debut feature and, with Rebeca Marques, does the film in a unique and unconventional way combining editing, co writing, directing and acting, making it all at the same time an action thriller, a mystery film, a melodrama about human relationships, and a light-and-sound performance. It establishes its own set of principles and communicates its narrative in its own visual style. And while it appears to take a very clear and straightforward route, it cleverly shifts direction by introducing new concepts that provide a completely new context for the film. Fifteen minutes later on, it does it again and then does it yet again.
Not every ingredient succeeds the film may be stronger in terms of direction, performance, and editing than writing, and it might try to reset the theoretical clock just a few times too many, but your mileage will vary of course. And yet its skillful sense of tone and rhythm is extraordinary not to mention the fact that the work as a whole projects a quiet self-assurance that negates particular grumbles one might have.
It also embodies Pedro Almodovar’s assertion that movies should not only have motion they should have movement, dancing. I have witnessed three pagination montages that rank with the best I have seen, and all along, the cutting evokes tension in time not only with speed and sound but with stillness and quiet. There is very little music in “Things Will Be Different.” I mean the natural sound that is noise quite 90% of the time when it is just a natural sound where the characters are such as: a damp smelling basement or a creepy forest or some other place. When a film makes you numb to the pain, there are so many things that make you go ‘more and more’ the squealing sound of a foot on a floorboard or something (or someone?) sliding through a cornfield that encircles the farmhouse. Plainly, this is the focus of this article it is all very familiar ground, and, shown repeatedly and with a healthy dose of variety, illness diagrams are cut into the American midlands topsoil and, depending on the story of what is happening, may be conceptual or real. (It is easy to envision this story reimagined as a stage adaption.)
Right, I almost forgot, the plot.
Not knowing everything, as tempting as it may be, is probably best because it adds a sense of surprise, and also because, after all, this is a movie and I think the movie is more concerned with feeling and rhythm rather than logic and coherence. What I can tell you though is the brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and sister Sidney (Riley Dandy) come to the farmhouse with rifles, scare off three men who were hanging around outside, and enter the premises to do things illegal, illegal in almost every sense of time and space unless you are Christopher Nolan or Alain Resnais (“Last Year at Marienbad”). The premise that I expounded a while ago that this is a crime thriller where the actors use time warp as some sort of built-in cheat applies really only in the first ten and fifteen minutes. The story gets more interesting than that.
We start to get pieced together the real history of Sidney or Joseph for they more like boy and girl who are not siblings. Sidney is described as a foster that grew up to be a sibling, so the story goes. As children raised together, their banter is sibling like. When they move, it is as if two cats raised by the same mother cat with a killer instinct. Both are armed with something akin to a rifle with a scope, and they are proficient enough with it. Their love is the most important aspect around which the film revolves making it easier to sail through the rough scenes in the film.
Thompson and Dandy are, in this regard, the strongest cast even away from the direct physical action, including hand to hand combat or gunfire, in the rounded scenes where they share a meal or tell their backstories, and their relationship is so believable that if the press notes said there were brothers and sisters, I would not challenge it. They frequently finish each other’s lines and complete each other’s thoughts and even in fights, one of them would be so vocal that a few seconds after the first scream, there is a good chance, a few tears will follow from that person. A young couple matures on such Love whilst performing onscreen, and it is precisely this amatory purity which is vital for leading actors of a film that feels more like it is ‘conducted’, than ‘directed’.
I always keep emphasizing the point that ‘content’ story is not everything in cinema. Things Will Be Different is an ideal instance. It is more about the characters’ outcomes and their significance for the characters and for the audience, and how the fragments are connected in the end, in their heads. However, it is also the feelings of these characters when they are faced with the horrifying and surreal elements of their context. The movie’s audience sympathizes with them. At the same time, it has an emotionally cold clinical perspective and seems to be documenting an observational study. The way it is shot allows one to appreciate what the filmmakers were going through during the event. They were engaged in something creative which was so unique that its outcome could not be predicted but its purpose was known.
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