Time Cut (2024) Review: A Cut-Rate Time-Travel Teen Slasher
Time Cut combines a teen slasher, a time-travel element and a knife-wielding masked killer. It all feels like a deja vu experience since the movie instantly reminds me of Prime Video’s Totally Killer. A total rip-off? Well, upon a little online digging, Time Cut apparently wrapped production in August 2021 and it was long before Totally Killer even began filming (they only started the following year in May). The former got its release date delayed and Totally Killer ended up on Prime Video streaming service last year.
Whereas Totally Killer was more of a fun self-aware time-travel slasher comedy, Time Cut plays it mostly straight. The story begins on April 18, 2003, in a (fictional) small town called Sweetly, Minnesota. A party is held in a barn to commemorate the death of Summer’s (Antonia Gentry) best friend Emmy (Megan Best) and other teenagers from the same high school resulting from a notorious masked killer dubbed the “Sweetly Slasher”.
That same night Summer becomes the latest victim before the movie jumps over 20 years ahead in April 2024. This is where Lucy (Madison Bailey) is introduced, who finds out she’s been selected to join the summer internship programme at NASA but her parents don’t seem to share the same enthusiasm as she does. When Lucy joins her parents to pay respect to her late sister Summer’s death anniversary at a makeshift memorial, she notices something glowing inside a barn, which prompts her to check it out and finds a time-travelling machine.
Then the machine flashes and the next thing she knows, she’s in a different timeline… going back from 2004 to 2003. Or more specifically, it was days before Summer was killed during that fateful night. From there, she meets Summer and strikes up a friendship with Quinn (Griffin Gluck) a physics and sci-fi geek who believes in her coming from the future.
Lucy and Quinn soon help each other to figure out how to prevent the killing from happening but too bad director Hannah Macpherson, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Freaky and It’s a Wonderful Knife scribe Michael Kennedy, doesn’t seem to be interested in embracing the thrills of the teen slasher subgenre. There are a few kills revolving around the masked killer murdering the victims such as the one that takes place in a mall but it’s more like an afterthought. Even the kills themselves are disappointingly tame while lacking the necessary palpable tension.
The stakes are low while the introduction of the masked killer who looks nearly identical to Totally Killer, particularly the design and shape of the mask, is nothing more than a cipher. A placeholder and an excuse to fill in the movie with some slasher moments except that everything is executed in a surface-level blandness. This, in turn, makes the should-have-been lean 90-minute length surprisingly a chore to sit through.
The movie also incorporates the time-travel element but again, Macpherson seems to be showing a lack of interest in exploring more on the sci-fi angle. This leaves the drama between Lucy and Summer and how the friendship to the bonding of their sisterhood as siblings grows as the movie progresses. Madison Bailey and Antonia Gentry do share some genuine chemistry but it’s a pity the overall story and Macpherson’s inept direction fail to elevate their characters further.
The movie does poke some fun at the early 2000s time capsule from the dial-up noise of a modem to mentioning yet-to-be-exist social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. But scenes like this are only few and far between, making me wonder why so many opportunities have been wasted in making good use of the movie’s multiple genre hybrids.
If there are any other positive elements worth mentioning here, Renee Fontana’s costume design manages to hit the nostalgia factor on the 2000s fashion style while it’s nice to relive the sound of era-defining songs like Avril Lavinge’s “Complicated” and Michelle Branch’s “All You Wanted” served as needle drops.
Time Cut is currently streaming on Netflix.
