One of the more curious cinematic pairings in recent years has been that of a slasher premise and a time travel hook. Between the Happy Death Day films, the Prime Video-exclusive Totally Killer, and the tangentially-relevant It’s a Wonderful Knife, lots of killers have enjoyed sinking their blades into multiple timelines, even if the films aren’t always enjoyable themselves.
Time Cut is the latest to get in on this trend, and if there was ever a film that so perfectly captured the result of boundless potential paired with almost-pathological incompetence, this Netflix charter would be it.
Per FlixPatrol, Time Cut is bossing the Netflix film rankings in the United States at first place at the time of writing, having topped the likes of the Sam Raimi-produced survival horror Don’t Move in second place, and Martha Stewart autodoc Martha in third place.
Time Cut stars Outer Banks‘ Madison Bailey as Lucy Field, a high school student living in Sweetly, a thoroughly depressing Minnesotan town that’s been in a perpetual state of grief ever since the murder of four high school students 20 years earlier. One of them was Lucy’s older sister, Summer (Antonia Gentry), who was killed before Lucy was born.
Somehow, Lucy stumbles upon a time machine that beams her back to the year 2003, days before Summer and her friends were murdered, where she endeavors to prevent the tragedy that regrettably defines her town — and life — in the present.
Now, prior to Lucy getting Marty McFly’d, Time Cut really, really, really wants you to know that four teenagers were murdered in the town of Sweetly. Every single frame and line of dialogue prior to the inciting incident alludes to the murders in some way, and the grotesquely unnatural state of said dialogue makes the first several scenes border on parody.
The overarching, wooden senselessness of the writing — both plot and dialogue-wise — is never really something that Time Cut solves during its runtime, but buried beneath the mounds and mounds of technical disappointment is a staggering wealth of storytelling potential.
Lucy occupies a supremely curious emotional position in the film. In her time, her parents are gloomy and unenthusiastic, whereas her parents in 2003 (i.e. prior to the murder of Summer and Lucy’s birth) are bright, happy, cheerful, and involved. That’s an utterly fascinating thing for a teenager to try and reconcile, and additional revelations in this vein serve up even more depth just waiting to be unpacked.
Moreover, Summer is none-too-subtly built up as a closeted lesbian that never got the chance to come out, and the killer reveal opens the door for some surprisingly relevant and important themes of masculinity. Indeed, you would never, ever know it from the content-film sheen that it gives off, but Time Cut actually plays host to some genuinely scrumptious narrative meat.
Unfortunately, the content-film sheen takes precedence here, and so this meat is never actually tossed on to the proverbial barbecue. Instead, it mostly just sits in the freezer being marveled at from a distance while the film downs another bag of potato chips and uses the nutritional info on the bag for inspiration. Director and co-writer Hannah MacPherson and co-writer Michael Kennedy, however, would be wise to keep on going, because if they polish up their fundamentals enough, they could very well make something truly special.
