Netflix’s Poor Excuse For A Slasher Should’ve Followed Its Dramatic Instincts

Time Cut is a frustrating film, twice over. On the one hand, it takes a genre conceit that should be a layup and sleepwalks right through it, in a way that implies the audience deserves no effort beyond what it took to get them to press play. As if those who love slashers or time-travel movies are won over by premises alone, not the passion and creativity of their execution. Certain scenes left me feeling more insulted than disappointed.

On the other hand, there is another, better movie buried within Time Cut that occasionally peeks through, and that I so desperately wanted to be watching. You never want to be left envisioning an alternate path for something you just finished, so clear to you that it becomes aggravating to think about what the film actually was. Still, I admire it for provoking the questions that it does, and I’m still trying to grapple with the cognitive dissonance of that. I apologize if, in trying to reconcile these reactions, my review leaves you feeling the same way.

Time Cut Wastes Both Its Slasher & Time-Travel Elements

Creativity Is Missing Here, And Nothing Works Without It

In 2003, four teenagers were murdered by the Sweetly Slasher, with Summer (Antonia Gentry) the final victim. In 2024, her sister Lucy (Madison Bailey), born after the killings, lives with the wreckage. The town is a shell of its formal self, most of its businesses shuttered. Lucy’s parents seem stuck in a joyless holding pattern. They keep Summer’s room perfectly intact and can process their living daughter’s life only in terms of the potential for danger. When she wins a summer internship at NASA, they can only suggest the lab where her father works instead, closer to home.

One day, in Summer’s room, Lucy finds a seemingly threatening letter under her floorboards, signed “E.” The first and only clue in years. Then, on her family’s annual pilgrimage to the shrine they’ve built where Summer died, she catches a mysterious flash of light coming from a nearby barn. She follows it, finds a mysterious machine, and (despite being set up to us as NASA-smart) just presses the start button. One thing leads to another, and Lucy finds herself in 2003, on the day the murders began.

To start with the bad, both the slasher and time-travel portions of Time Cut are defined by laziness. They aspire to the bare minimum of function, lacking the ambition for fun or creativity required to stand out in either genre. The details of the case and the mechanics of the time machine are breezed through in clunky exposition and technobabble. Neither have any real bearing on the story.

The nature and consequences of time travel, fertile ground for imaginative play, are left severely underbaked here. So much time is devoted to talking about fears of a universe-destroying paradox, a familiar cliché, but how many movies actually commit to that concept? We know someone will try to change the past anyway (there’d be no story otherwise), so why spend so long harping on what inevitably won’t bear out?

The horror sequences are even less successful. The film is unable to sustain any tension and is seemingly afraid of its own potential for violence, despite gesturing toward the creative weapon choice that is practically a bar for entry into the slasher genre. The killer lacks any presence or personality, and, in part because of the rigidness of the time-travel premise, has no real power to surprise. The character’s design has an unfortunate resemblance to that of last year’s Totally Killer, but with a less inspiring execution, which leaves it fairly toothless.

I should linger on that comparison a moment. Time Cut and Totally Killer have remarkably similar premises, often separated by technicalities like sister vs. mother, 2000s vs. 1980s. Time Cut was announced and filmed first, but not only did Totally Killer beat it to market, it’s also (while more good than great) clearly superior in every area I’ve dissected so far. I don’t know quite what to make of this coincidence, except that Netflix’s movie undoubtedly suffers from its competitor’s existence.

Lucy’s Family Status Is The Best Part Of Time Cut

I Wish This Had Been The Whole Movie

And yet, Time Cut makes one fascinating choice that could’ve really set it apart, had it been properly foregrounded. Lucy has a complicated relationship to this traumatic event, having been raised in its shadow. She’s eager to finally meet the sister she’s only lived with as a ghost, and she finds Summer easy to love. But she also discovers her living a much sunnier life. Her parents are warm, caring, and encouraging. Truly happy. They welcome Lucy in, thinking her a friend of Summer’s, and they widen their umbrella of care when they sense in Lucy a less-than-nurturing home life.

Bailey plays these scenes with a mournful touch that seems out of step with so much of what the film is doing, but also so much more compelling. Lucy asks her unwitting parents if they’ve ever considered having a second child, and with a loving glance at Summer, they tell her no. One was always all they needed. And given how dialogue eventually confirms Lucy was no accident, the film is remarkably frank about the fact that she was born to fill the hole left by Summer’s death. They just don’t have it in them to love her on her own terms.

With the nature of time travel unclear, Lucy is concerned about how intervening in the killings will change the future, and Summer’s murder is by far the most troubling. It’s clear to her that if Summer lives, her parents will never have her. Her life is sad, but clearly full of potential. Is she willing to trade it for her family to be happy without her? Summer, who isn’t kept in the dark very long and gets close to Lucy, faces a similar conundrum. Can she accept her own death if it means her sister gets to exist?

Those are heavy, thorny questions to go with heavy, thorny feelings. They give stretches of Time Cut real weight – far more than I would’ve thought possible after watching the rest of it. I can’t help but think about how interesting it would have been to have this thread be the movie; how rich the characters and themes could have become. It would’ve put a headier, sci-fi spin on the slasher format, instead of the nominal genre splicing we got. I have to give the movie credit for planting this seed. But it doesn’t rescue the rest of what’s onscreen.

Time Cut is now available to stream on Netflix. The film is 93 minutes long and is not currently rated.

3/10

A teenage girl goes back in time to the early 2000s to save her sister from a dangerous killer.

Pros

• Finds a surprisingly compelling emotional vein for its lead

Cons

• A lazy time-travel movie, and an even lazier slasher
• Relies on exposition and takes its details for granted
• Fails to stand out in a crowded genre (and even in its niche subgenre)