Things Will Be Different

The promise in the title is a big one. Different how? Different for who? Different for Sidney (Riley Dandy), the sister, who goes to meet her brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson) in a bar and observes that he looks like he slept in a ditch? Different for the audience who might, like Joseph, feel as if they’ve been here before? Different this time around?

Sidney doesn’t want to be away from her six-year-old daughter, Steph, for long. That’s the sort of promise Joseph can respect, despite all the troubles of the past. He will try to help her keep it. We don’t really learn a lot about how they fit into the world, but we learn how they relate to one another. She owns a pawn shop, he used to own a bar. They’ve both been through the wringer and, amongst other things, it has cost them their friendship. Now they have been brought back together by bank robbery and want to make the most of their time together in the safe house to repair their bond.

It’s quite a safe house – recommended to them by a ‘regular’ of his. When they find it, there are local kids outside drinking; Sidney takes bold action to scare them away. Joseph isn’t too worried about them, however. Though they will remain close by in space, he and his sister will be safely distant in time. A simple adjustment of the clocks in the building, according to a code, and the two of them can enter a secret room. When they emerge again, the summer landscape outside the windows has been replaced by frost, and they’re in the 1970s.

With beguiling cinematography by Carissa Dorson and low key but highly effective production design by Zach Thomas, the film is effortlessly transporting. It’s so well done that one might be quite content simply to spend time there with the siblings, listening to their reminiscences and watching them wander about as they wait for the days to pass in their own time. Nothing, however, is as simple as they had hoped. When they find the door to the secret room locked and a sign upon it reading ‘Go to the mill,’ it abruptly becomes clear that something is very, very wrong.

What follows is a twisty little puzzle which will please viewers who came along after noticing Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead listed as producers, but like the best of their work, there’s more to it, and that, really, is where things are different. As Joseph and Sidney find themselves caught between present and past, tormented by people whose obscure motives they might one day understand all too well, Michael Felker teases us with snippets of Abba’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!, cutting through Jimmy LaValle and Michael Muller’s mournfully melodic score. Time becomes an uneasy thing, condensed as at an awkward family gathering that never seems to end. Under pressure, promises are strained; it becomes harder to hold onto what matters.

Both Dandy and Thompson are on great form. The tautness of the story gives them plenty of opportunity to interact, and where other such tales have become overly enmeshed in their own structural entanglements, Felker has the good sense to focus on character. The resulting film, whilst it might not feel highly original, is textured and appealing. You will watch because you care. It’s a simple thing, but it’s delivered well.