Things Will Be Different is a bit promising but ultimately a rough watch. It has a casual acceptance of big trippy sci-fi ideas that are mired in a desperately low-fi sci-fi environment.

It’s about a brother and sister on the run with a bagful of money. Their safe house is one of them there farmhouses on the cusp of a time/space pocket universe that will warp them to a new reality so they can lay low until the heat dies off. You know… that old trope.

Yeah, for a film about pocket dimensions and temporal hideouts, the main characters take it pretty well. It was apparently part of the plan… which seems like a big ask for a movie otherwise set in the real world (initially). I kind of dug the casual acceptance of big ideas… it’s a take.

Unfortunately, the movie is so desperately low budget that even the characters remark on how nothing is happening for long stretches of time. I get it… you don’t have a big budget for big ideas, but maybe you don’t have to waste our time with a lot of nothing?

When things do happen, sometimes they are cool sci-fi time-wimey ideas borrowed a bit from Blink, the fantastic episode of Dr. Who. And there continues to be cool ideas interspersed through some half-way decent action thriller moments late in the film.

I’m just ultimately unconvinced they knew where to take their ideas and I wound up unimpressed and underwhelmed at the end (and fairly bored in the middle). Not just because they make hand-waving gestures at much bigger things going on, but because the ultimate loop in their time loop didn’t have the impact they intended.

I genuinely wish I liked this film more. It has some good ideas but not enough of them. And it needed a solid thirty minutes of time wasting hacked out of it, maybe even more.

Score: 66