What Tomorrow Brings Put the Engelbert Sisters on the Line

Joely Engelbert asked her dad to make a feature after a lost callback, then played a senior hiding a dark secret from her sister. What Tomorrow Brings is a 97-minute drama Matt Engelbert shot on iPhone 15 Pro Max phones, and Joely won Best Actress at the Santa Fe Film Festival.

Buffalo 8 put the film on digital platforms on July 24, 2026, and it is up on Amazon, Plex, Fandango at Home, and Fawesome. Matt held as many as three phones. Joely and Phoebe Engelbert co-wrote their lines and played the sisters.

Joely Had Already Lost Enough Auditions

This was not a kid pulled into a hobby shoot. Joely had been going out for lead and supporting-lead parts since she was 12. She got close on one job, then lost it to an 18-year-old, and she was done waiting.

Dad, we need to make a film. I don’t care how long it takes. We need to make a film.

Joely Engelbert, actor and co-writer

Matt already had a story. He said he had lived through part of it with close friends, the fear of what happens to children when nobody is left to care for them, and he had to change the kids’ ages a lot for the script. He also already had a family that knew cameras and cues. He produced the series Ariel & Zoey & Eli, Too and Steal the Show, a TV-G music series that ran from 2013 to 2017 across 31 episodes with songwriter Jim Peterik.

He told an interviewer he would not have made this feature if he was not making it with them. Joely later said she was 16 or 17 on the shoot, that Clara sat in her head the whole time, and that it took a long while to leave the role. At nearly 20 she can step out of a character. Then, she said, she started to morph into one.

A Senior Year With No Adults Left

Clara, played by Joely, is a high school senior with a band, a boyfriend, and a little sister, Ruby, played by Phoebe. Their father has been dead for years. Their mother, listed as Jessica Grace, is sliding into depression and says she is leaving for a place that will make her better. Ruby’s birthday is close. Clara is the one who has to keep the lights on.

Alan Ng, who scored the film 7 out of 10, laid out the grind that follows. Clara tries to give Ruby a good birthday, then hits declining cards, a dead car, and a night when Ruby gets sick. She talks to Lindsay, a lawyer played by Grace Bydalek, about guardianship, then backs off when the questions get too close. She hides the worst facts so Ruby can still feel safe.

Matt brought Joely and Phoebe onto the script so the talk would sound like them. When reviewers later said kids would never speak that way, he laughed and pointed at the credits. He also knew viewers might get impatient with Clara for two thirds of the running time, waiting for her to do the “right” adult thing. He needed Ruby to feel like a real child, not a cute prop, because the audience had to care what Clara was protecting.

The official trailer, posted by BondIt Media Capital and Buffalo 8, opens on that senior-year voiceover.

Log Encoding Arrived in Time for October

Cameras were due on October 10, 2023. Apple unveiled the iPhone 15 Pro Max on September 12, 2023, and put it on sale on September 22, 2023, 18 days before that start date. Matt wanted festival-level files, not a phone clip with the contrast already baked in, and he paired the Pro Max with a Beastgrip 1.33 anamorphic lens.

APPLE’S 2023 VIDEO KIT

• Log on a phone: Apple said the iPhone 15 Pro lineup added a new option for Log encoding and was the first smartphone to support ACES, the Academy Color Encoding System.
• ProRes files: Apple’s support pages describe ProRes recording in Log encoding on iPhone 15 Pro models, including to USB-C external drives.
• Size cost: Those ProRes files can run up to 30 times larger than HEVC clips, which is the storage tax for keeping grade room in post.
• Eli’s veto: Matt’s son hated the camera choice until they shot one scene, the bedroom on the night of Ruby’s birthday, and watched it back.

After that test he bought two more Pro Max phones so a scene could run on one, two, or three bodies. He wrote, directed, operated, and lit. He said log later gave him coloring options he had not planned on, which is the whole point of a flat file: you push it in the grade instead of praying the phone’s baked look holds.

Why the Camera Had to Stay Small

Eli was on boom and soundtrack. On that first scene he stopped his father and asked for one continuous take, no chopping the actors out of a rhythm. Matt was annoyed, then saw the method. With more than one phone, the only way the movie would work was to let Joely and Phoebe find a scene and keep rolling.

He has said Clara is in 99% of the scenes because the story is told through her journal and voiceover. A full-size camera in that face, take after take, would have changed the room. The phone’s weight let him walk backward through woods with a spotter so he did not trip on a stump. A hallway fight and a tent scene, he said, would not have been possible for him with a larger body.

THE ENGELBERT CREW

• Matt Engelbert: Writer, director, camera, and lighting, working guerrilla in the family house, a kids’ condo, restaurants, woods, and playgrounds.
• Joely and Phoebe: Co-writers and leads; Joely also sings the closing number.
• Eli Engelbert: Producer, production sound, and score, the one who pushed the single-take rule.
• Zoey Engelbert: Hair and makeup, the on-screen bass player, and writer of the end-title song Until She Smiles.
• Ariel Engelbert: The teacher on camera, plus help behind the set.
• Caroline Engelbert: Catering, wardrobe, the off-camera voice of Dr. McAdams, and the Thanksgiving turkey the cast ate before the extras got a plate.

Michigan did not give them much snow that winter. On the one storm day, after dinner, Matt told the girls to grab coats, hats, mittens, and boots. With street light, house light, and two handheld Coleman lanterns, the three of them shot the walk from a restaurant to a dead car and into the woods. He still calls that some of the best footage in the film.

For the tent, he made sure Phoebe saw the makeup go on so the sight of her sister would not rattle her, then let her keep her eyes closed. Joely said Phoebe was sleeping. On the last shooting day they filmed the song Zoey wrote. Joely said it did not land until her father told her this was the last performance, and then she was sad and also done. Clara could go.

Tangerine’s $100,000 iPhone Path

Phone features did not start in 2023. Sean Baker’s Tangerine went to Sundance in 2015 on iPhone 5s handsets, three of them, with prototype Moondog Labs anamorphic adapters and the $8 app Filmic Pro. Baker has said the budget was $100,000 and that he would not have made the movie without the wide lens, because he wanted a true scope image, not a vertical phone clip.

Baker also used the small body the way Matt later did, to move through public space without a circus. First-time actors were less spooked by a phone than by a package and a crew. James Ransone, who had done The Wire, joked about ending up in an iPhone movie, then said the kit still demanded that you know cameras, sound, and cutting.

TWO IPHONE FEATURES, A DECADE APART

Matt is not Baker, and this is not Sundance. The rhyme is the kit math. Once the phone can hold a wide image and a gradeable file, you stop renting bodies and operators, and the remaining cost is time, food, locations, and whether the people in front of the lens can bear the story.

He Owns the Indoor Light, Not Apple

Matt has read the notes on indoor flatness and taken them. He said that problem was on him, not the iPhone, and that the outdoor work was the footage people agreed on. Louisa Moore, writing about the 97-minute cut, was blunter on craft. She praised the sister writing and the long takes that trap you with Clara, then listed background noise, soft focus, echo, shake, and scenes that run long, and called those flaws highly distracting.

Ng was kinder on setups at school, home, and in offices, and still warned that the plot is a rough watch if you do not want to see children in danger. He treated the phone as proof that a person with a story should press record.

All you need is your cell phone, some willing collaborators, and the courage to press record.

Alan Ng, critic, Film Threat

That line travels because it is simple. It also skips the part Joely described. Courage, in this case, included a teenager staying in a suicide-adjacent headspace for months while her father, by his own account, kept wanting to protect Clara on the page. He said he had to pivot in the last third. He could have kept hurting her. He would not. Dad instincts, he said, kicked in. A podcast later summed the same choice as a hope-filled ending against other ideas from the team.

Santa Fe, Then a July Digital Window

The film played festivals before anyone could rent it. Joely’s Best Actress prize at the Santa Fe Film Festival in 2025 is the credit Buffalo 8 puts first. The same sheet lists the Richmond International Film Festival as an official selection and Best Feature at the Saints and Sinners Film Festival.

FROM LOG TO DIGITAL

1. September 12, 2023: Apple unveils iPhone 15 Pro Max with Log and ProRes workflows.
2. September 22, 2023: The phone goes on sale.
3. October 10, 2023: Matt starts the six-month shoot in Michigan, including Ann Arbor.
4. 2025: World premiere and Best Actress at Santa Fe; later Richmond and Saints and Sinners.
5. June 26, 2025: Ng’s 7 out of 10 review lands while the film is still on the circuit.
6. July 24, 2026: Buffalo 8’s digital date; Amazon, Plex, Fandango at Home, and Fawesome follow as storefronts.

Amazon’s listing lets viewers rent HD for $4.99 or buy HD for $6.99. Matt now lives in Southwest Florida. Joely has been working music under her own name, including Until She Smiles, cut for the last scene. The phone kit is already old by phone-cycle time. The part that does not age is a family that wrote a dark story, put the youngest two in it, and then had to decide how much pain Clara was allowed to keep.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is What Tomorrow Brings Rated by the MPAA?

No. Press notes for the Buffalo 8 rollout say the film will not be rated by the MPAA, so storefronts handle their own content flags instead of a theatrical letter.

How Much Does It Cost to Rent What Tomorrow Brings on Amazon?

Prime Video lists HD rent at $4.99 and HD buy at $6.99, with a content advisory for violence, smoking, and foul language, and English closed captions on the file.

Who Else Is in the Cast Around Clara and Ruby?

Jessica Grace is listed as the mother, Grace Bydalek as lawyer Lindsay, Emmanuel Morgan as boyfriend Noah, Caden Martel as bandmate Jason, and Zoey, Ariel, and Caroline Engelbert in supporting and off-camera parts, with Kevin Morgan, Piper Morgan, Hugh Entrekin, and Sarah Joy Milner also credited.

What Company Produced What Tomorrow Brings?

Listings name Soup J Productions as the production company and Buffalo 8 as the distributor, with Elijah Engelbert credited as a producer beside Matt.