SXSW 2024: Watch the Trailer for Michael Felker’s Midnight Selection Sci-Fi Thriller ‘Things Will Be Different’ Ahead of the World Premiere

Credit: Last Life Films

Premiering as part of the festival’s esteemed Midnight section, the exciting discovery title marks Michael Felker’s feature directorial debut and boasts genre filmmaking icons and celebrated Marvel directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson(Something in the Dirt, Disney+’s Loki) as Executive Producers championing the new voice and vision. Written and directed by Felker, who has been Moorhead and Benson’s editor across nearly all of their feature films, ‘Things Will Be Different’ stars Adam David Thompson(Netflix’s Vampires vs. the Bronx, FX’s A Teacher) and Riley Dandy (Christmas Bloody Christmas). Chloe Skoczen (Undergrads), Justin Benson (Something in the Dirt), and Sarah Bolger (Once Upon a Time, Emelie) complete the cast.

YouTube player

A bold, stylish, and uncompromising debut for Felker, ‘Things Will Be Different’ is an intimately-shot and grippingly paced sci-fi about time loops, metaphysics, and alternate realities —elevated with dark doses of horror and chilling suspense— experienced through the fracturing relationship between two ill-fated siblings.

Things Will Be Different SXSW
Credit: Carissa Dorson

The film focuses on estranged siblings, Joseph and Sidney, and rendezvous at a local diner after a close-call robbery, they hightail it to an abandoned farmhouse that transports them to a different time in order to escape the local cops. But when they try to return to their present after the coast is clear, an unknown metaphysical force cuts them off and maroons them on the land unless they do exactly what they’re told. What comes from this not only bends the forces of spacetime but also bends Joe and Sid’s familial bonds beyond the point of trust and forgiveness.

The film is produced by Shane Spiegel, Jacob Rosenthal, and Felker, acting under the banner of his production company, Last Life. Moorhead, Benson, and David Lawson Jr executive produced for Rustic Films. Felker edited with Rebeca Marques, Carissa Dorson lensed, and Jimmy LaValle aka The Album Leaf (The Endless) composed with Michael A. Muller.