Starring Adam David Thompson, Riley Dandy, Chloe Skoczen, Justin Benson, Sarah Bolger and Jori Felker

Written and directed by Michael Felker

Magnet

Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) have committed a robbery and are on the run. They’re loosely estranged in the way a lot of adult siblings are, trusting each other despite the years of hurt behind them. They need this to work and Joseph has a unique angle. The safehouse he’s found for them is dislocated in time.

Writer and director Michael Felker’s debut plays a lot like Andrew Patterson’s 2019 debut The Vast of Night. Both dial in on a single relationship, both play with genre and both hint at vast powers moving beneath the surface. They’d make a great double bill too because both are ultimately concerned with how vital human connection is in the face of colossal, seemingly inhuman forces.

Thompson and Dandy are spectacular, bringing an exhausted, bruised love to the siblings at the core of this story. One of the best moment is an early one where they scare people off the safehouse. Moving with the relaxed confidence of people who’ve been raised together in extreme situations, they pick up and riff off each other’s actions in a way that’s highly competent, highly dangerous and enormous fun.

Felker cleverly opens the movie at a high point, with the pair having succeeded. Seeing them arrive at that moment, and then seeing the impossible nature of the house and what it truly is slowly grind away at them is the sort of intimate science fiction horror that fans of Donnie Darko or Primer will enjoy. Dandy plays Sidney as a soldier looking for a war to understand to death. Thompson plays Joseph as a man so desperate to atone, pushed so far he can’t accept that there’s still more to do.

The minimalist nightmare that Felker locks them is incredibly interesting and carefully designed to show us just enough. Mysterious carved messages appear around the house. Joseph bonds with mysterious figures who can only communicate via a tape recorder in a locked safe. The pair are told they are outside time, discover they can’t leave the safehouse’s grounds without being horrifically nauseous. And then they’re told someone new is coming. Their freedom will be granted if they kill them. But can they? Their relationship fragments under the twin siege engines of captivity and invasion and something has to break, something has to be different. Everything does, and nothing is and as the movie ends you’ll find yourself wanting to watch it again with the hard-earned context the siblings have bled for.

Verdict: Movies like this ask a lot of you and some viewers will be deeply frustrated by the answers we don’t get. But they’re all answers we can find in the movie if we look for them. Intensely ambitious and oddly sweet, this is a hell of a debut and yet more proof that mid to no level budget SF movies are still an engine of invention and optimism. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

 

Things Will Be Different is released on 4th October in cinemas