'Time Cut' Arrived Late The Time Travel Slasher Party

Given Netflix’s own ‘Fear Street’ series, 2023’s ‘Totally Killer,’ and the success of the ‘Happy Death Day’ films, business has been booming for slasher mixed with time travel sub-genre. You can see why this has been a relatively successful pairing – everybody loves a good slasher, and they also love nostalgia. But with any formula, there comes a point when you go back to the well too many times, and it ends up dry. ‘Time Cut’ suffers because it’s being released at a point where almost every angle has been done. Even when Hannah MacPherson’s film tries to tinker with the formula, it doesn’t necessarily resurrect it to the point of freshness. ‘Time Cut’ often falls in love with trying to hit the pop culture benchmarks of its period rather than create a stronger bond to the story’s urgency.

You’ll hear Hillary Duff’s “So Yesterday” and Vanessa Carleton’s “A Thousand Miles” and see CD players and early 2000s fashion. However, aside from a few benchmarks, there’s nothing more definable about any of the periods- thus, it’s hard to fully care for the worlds (and people) that inhabit them.

Lucy Field (Madison Bailey) is preparing to apply to a NASA internship program in 2024, but a tragedy hangs over her family and Sweetly, Minnesota. Back in 2003, “The Sweetly Slasher” killed four teenagers, including her sister Summer (Antonia Gentry). Unfortunately, Lucy never meets Summer, and a black cloud hangs over her head for a long time. Out of sheer coincidence, Lucy walks into a barn and finds a time machine that happens to transport her back two days before her sister and friends get murdered in 2003. MacPherson and co-writer Michael Kennedy introduce key plot points and the puzzles that time travel films all go into.

Of course, Lucy wants to save her sister, but what will that mean for her? Will she cease to exist if she were to change the order of events? Hell, will even seeing Summer and her family ensure that things will be out of wack when she goes home? Those things by themselves establish a heavy amount of stakes. ‘Time Cut’ doesn’t feel like it wants to engage with the horror aspect of its premise-with that, it brings the suspense down considerably. The killer look can be interchangeable from the one in ‘Totally Killer’ and doesn’t bring that menacing presence you need to bring in a slasher film. There are a couple of scenes of danger, but they happen far too quickly, where the narrow focus on a specific set of characters shows how thin this plot is.

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Upon traveling to 2003, Lucy needs a Doc-type character to help with the scientific nature of getting back home somehow. Quinn (Griffin Gluck), a physics wiz, fills that void and doesn’t fail to remind Lucy that changing things in the past could be a bad idea. Even with Quinn’s constant warnings, “Time Cut” doesn’t follow the rules it almost sets in place – it discards them immediately. Without the suspenseful impact, the film relies on trying to be a high school teen drama. With Lucy’s character, it’s seeing the sister you never knew coupled with the fact that there may not be a world where you can both exist together. Bailey and Gentry try to get those feelings across inside the many moments ‘Time Cut’ sets aside for them to talk about things, but it eventually all falls away. There’s even a coming-out story interlinked as a side plot that would have had more impact had there been more investment in making it so. In a film that uses dialogue to express apparent differences between 2003 and 2024 (Instagram and Twitter are a couple), this seemed to be a missed opportunity to highlight that.

‘Time Cut’ doesn’t create unique identifiers past the obvious that you would see and falls short of separating these two distinct years. Aside from a couple of shots of a Walkman and musical cues, it’s hard to tell which period is which. That lack of detail is indicative of much of what doesn’t work. The film knows where it wants to send you, but is not confident against the clock in making it worthwhile.

Main Photo Credit: Netflix