TIME CUT - Mark Reviews Movies

Time Cut, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 30, 2024

A slasher movie with a time travel element should be at least a little fun, right? Maybe that's an unfair expectation to place upon Time Cut, especially since we saw the same gimmick implemented in another—and more entertaining—movie almost exactly a year ago. Whatever the case, co-writer/director Hannah Macpherson's variation on this silly gimmick takes itself so seriously that, when it's not going through the routine motions of this kind of horror movie, the material feels unnecessarily dour.

Let's face it: This is a silly idea, no matter how seriously the filmmakers may present it. It begins in 2003, in a sleepy little town that has been rocked by three murders over the course of two days. Local teens have decided to rebel against a curfew and hold a party in a barn on the outskirts of town. None of them, apparently, has seen a horror movie, and if they have, they definitely haven't seen any of the post-modern deconstructions that became so popular starting less than a decade before the prologue's setting.

We'll allow them their cinematic ignorance, though, and just chalk up the teens' reckless abandon of personal safety by being in the middle of nowhere when a masked serial killer has already murdered three of their peers to general ignorance. The killer strikes again, of course, killing Summer (Antonia Gentry), whose best friend was killed just the previous night, after some drama plays out in the barn and she wanders off on her own.

The story then jumps forward to 2024, when the little town is now rundown, with closed-up storefronts and all, and heavy with the air of the decades' old tragedy. It's heavier still on the family of Lucy (Maidson Bailey), Summer's younger sister, who was born a few years after the elder sibling's murder. Her parents (played by Rachel Crawford and Michael Shanks) are still devastated and understandably protective of Lucy, who just got an internship at NASA and worries her folks won't let her go.

Feeling the weight of how much the past has determined the course of her life, Lucy visits the place where Summer was killed and discovers a strange device in a shed. Fidgeting with it, the thing opens up, revealing laser beams and a digital readout with a date on it: two days before Summer's death, to be precise. A portal appears, sending Lucy back to 2003.

When she realizes what has happened, the rest of the plot should be obvious. She has to figure out how to stop the masked killer before the murders happen. Well, that's her initial inclination, until she starts talking to Quinn (Griffin Gluck), a physics nerd who warns Lucy that making changes to the timeline could create a paradox or paradoxes that might destroy all of existence. One of the cleverer elements of Macpherson and Michael Kennedy's screenplay is that Quinn believes Lucy almost immediately, primarily because she shows him her smartphone—a device that was unthinkable in the days of dial-up modems.

Lucy also meets Summer, who's caught up in the romantic drama of having recently dumped Ethan (Samuel Braun) and a friendship dilemma with Emmy (Megan Best), who resents Summer dating the guy in the first place. There will be some slasher business, obviously, but then again, isn't this part of that genre formula?

After all, Lucy did find a vaguely threatening letter to Summer before being teleported back in time, signed only with the initial "E." This isn't just about trying to stop the murders. It's also about figuring out who the killer is before the killings start or continue, just as so many slasher movies are also contained little murder mysteries in between the violence.

There's not much of the latter here, which is fine, but it does point toward Macpherson's hesitation to really be a horror movie. One could say the same about the filmmaker's reluctance to deal with its time-travel conceit, too, since those rules seem to be made up as they go (Even the one character who should know those rules best is vague about them). Despite Quinn's warnings, Lucy does interfere with the past—with bad results at first, leading to a murder that didn't happen in the past of her present (if that makes sense). This should be a big deal, if not because of the changes to the timeline, then at least because Lucy's actions have resulted in someone's death. If she cares, she gets over it quickly, because there are more killings to stop—and maybe more to cause and forget about immediately.

The horror and time-travel stuff really does seem a secondary concern here. While that approach leads to some genuine moments between the two sisters who never knew each other, the whole movie winds up existing in a realm of untapped potential. The gimmick of Time Cut might not be new or unique, but it is intriguing and clever. Well, it could be, if a filmmaker actually explored and had some fun with it any significant way.

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