TIME CUT (2024)

Studio:   Netflix
Director: Hannah Macpherson
Writer:   Michael Kennedy, Hannah Macpherson
Producer: Matt Kaplan, Christopher Landon
Stars:    Madison Bailey, Antonia Gentry, Michael Shanks, Griffin Gluck, Rachael Crawford, Jordan Pettle, Megan Best, Samuel Braun, Sydney Sabiston, Kataem O'Connor

Review Score:

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Summary:

Inadvertently sent back in time, a teenage girl investigates the mystery behind the masked killer who will murder her sister.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

April 18, 2003 - Despite a masked murderer dubbed "The Sweetly Slasher" killing her friends Emmy, Val, and Brian over the preceding two days, high school senior Summer Field attends a Spring Fling party in a barn. Bullied nerd Quinn attempts to give Summer a letter confessing his longtime crush on her, but they are interrupted by Summer's ex-boyfriend Ethan. Left alone after cops break up the party, the Slasher later kills Summer.

April 18, 2024 - Teenager Lucy Field, who was born after Summer's murder and thus never knew her, receives encouragement from her Science teacher Mr. Fleming over the news she was accepted for a NASA internship. However, Lucy's parents Gil and Kendra, who birthed her to help cope with losing Summer, downplay the accolade as Lucy continues feeling as though her loner life is defined by Summer's death.

In her sister's bedroom, Lucy finds a cryptic letter from a sender with the initial E that she puts in her pocket. To honor Summer on the anniversary of her murder, Lucy later accompanies her parents on a visit to the farm where Summer died.

Inside a barn, Lucy finds a strange machine. Curious, Lucy activates the device, causing lasers to transport her to April 16th, 2003, the date when the serial killings began.

Recognizing she went back in time, Lucy goes to Sweetly High School where she sees her sister Summer having awkward interactions with her ex-boyfriend Ethan and estranged best friend Emmy. Lucy then visits Mr. Fleming to ask him about time travel, which attracts the attention of physics genius Quinn.

As a traditional hazing ritual, Ethan and Brian attempt to throw Quinn into a river in front of laughing classmates including Val and Summer, but Lucy stops the prank. Afterward, Lucy befriends Quinn and convinces him she is from the future by showing him her smartphone. Quinn helps Lucy bring the time machine to his garage workshop where they discover it runs on an antimatter cartridge, which they'll need to replace to get Lucy back to the future.

Ignoring Quinn's warning about creating time paradoxes by altering history, Lucy goes to her family's house to steal an employee keycard from Gil, who works at the SONR nuclear research facility where she can obtain a replacement antimatter cartridge. Posing as a tutor, Lucy befriends Summer and also observes her parents uncharacteristically behaving happily.

Remembering that the first murders are about to take place, Lucy rushes to the mall where she has brief encounters with Mr. Fleming, Ethan, and Quinn. The Slasher murders Brian in one of the stores. Lucy nearly rescues Val, but the Slasher kills her along with a security guard. Lucy and Quinn witness the killer's escape. Lucy realizes she changed history for the worse because the security guard did not die in her timeline.

The next day, Summer recalls a previous conversation and asks Lucy how she knew about the murders. Lucy explains she is Summer's sister from the future. Lucy tries to prove it by showing the letter she took from Summer's bedroom, which Summer does not recognize. However, Summer later receives the same letter, and realizes Lucy was telling the truth when she sees both papers match exactly.

Summer joins Lucy and Quinn, who continued bonding while repairing the time machine. Still afraid to warn Summer about her death, Lucy reveals Emmy dies next. Determined to keep Emmy alive, Summer convinces Lucy and Quinn to save Emmy despite disrupting history. The three of them successfully rescue Emmy from the Slasher at the marine museum, which rekindles the bond between Summer and Emmy.

Lucy and Summer discuss how the cryptic letter actually came from Emmy, not Ethan. Summer explains she and Ethan broke up because she developed romantic feelings for Emmy. However, Summer was afraid to come out to her parents, which caused the rift between her and Emmy.

During a moment with their parents, Lucy asks if Gil and Kendra ever considered having a second child. Lucy is disheartened when they amusedly say no, although she is finally able to steal Gil's keycard.

When she returns to Quinn's garage, Lucy finds Quinn's letter confessing his crush on Summer. Lucy and Quinn argue about what to do next because he wants to save Summer, but Lucy worries she won't exist if Summer never dies. Lucy ultimately tells Summer about her murder, and the two sisters plot with Quinn to unmask the Slasher.

Lucy and Quinn use Gil's keycard to get into the SONR building. Finding a dead security guard, the two of them realize the time machine belongs to the killer, and like them, he came to SONR to acquire an antimatter refill cartridge. Lucy and Quinn take a cartridge of their own before heading to the Spring Fling event.

At the barnyard party, Summer publicly kisses Emmy and tells her "I love you." Later, Summer confronts the Slasher in a barn. Lucy and Quinn arrive in time to rescue Summer by using Quinn's truck to ram the killer, who then gets unmasked as an alternate version of Quinn from the future.

Lucy, Summer, and Quinn race back to Quinn's garage to get Lucy into the recharged time machine. The second Quinn arrives shortly after them. Driven to rage by bullying, this Quinn explains he was pushed over the edge when Ethan and Ben threw him into the river, which Lucy was not there to prevent in his timeline. He also blamed Summer for making matters worse by rejecting him after he confessed his love for her at the party.

Lucy tackles the evil Quinn into the activated time machine, which transports them to a parking garage in 2024 where Quinn's house was in 2003. Following a struggle, Lucy knocks down the second Quinn with an electric vehicle charging cable before stabbing him through his heart with a knife.

Lucy uses the alternate Quinn's refill cartridge to reactivate the time machine and return to Lucy and Quinn in the past. Reasoning this timeline is where she was meant to be, Lucy restarts a happier life in 2003 with Summer as her sister.

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Review:

David Cronenberg and body horror. Kevin Williamson and postmodern slashers. With credits including "Happy Death Day" (review here), "It's a Wonderful Knife" (review here), and now "Time Cut" under their belts, cowriter Michael Kennedy and producer Christopher Landon appear to be making their names synonymous with time-travel whodunits, whether they ever intended to or not.

Welcome to 2003, a time when "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was on TV, Norah Jones was all over the radio, and Lucy Field's sister Summer was still alive, although not for long. Despite three of her friends dying over the past two days at the hands of a killer who hasn't been caught, Summer decides to commiserate with classmates at a beer-filled barnyard bash. Summer barely has time for brief encounters with nerdy nebbish Quinn and her ex-boyfriend Ethan when unfun cops arrive to break up the party. Left alone, Summer has one more encounter, this time with the masked murderer who makes her his fourth and final victim.

Flash forward to 2024. One way Summer's parents coped with their daughter's death was to give birth to Lucy, who essentially picks up where Summer left off as a high school senior, but 21 years later. Lucy feels like her loner life has been defined by Summer's death, so she sees herself as a misfit whose chronically unhappy parents can't even share her enthusiasm over a NASA scholarship.

In keeping with their somber spirits, Lucy's parents bring her to the farm where their previous daughter died to honor the anniversary of Summer's death. Inside a barn, Lucy finds an odd machine. Curious, she presses a button. Mechanical arms raise, lasers activate, and Lucy disappears in a blinding light.

Welcome back to 2003. Quickly realizing she inexplicably traveled back in time to the day when the killing spree started, Lucy takes her next trip to her high school, where she silently gasps at novelties like low-rise jeans and flip-phones the way Marty McFly marveled at pompadour hairstyles and diner waitresses on roller skates.

For viewers above a certain age, it's either amusing or depressing to see the film treat 2003 as nostalgia, with closeups on portable CD players and MP3 devices seemingly joking, "Remember how unsightly our bulky technology was? What a wild time to have been alive!" Don't worry if that visual gag makes you feel old. "Time Cut's" era-related jokes aren't always about quaintness. A couple of smirks can come from laugh-worthy lines about a problematic president, the terrifying sound of a dial-up modem, and how long Olive Garden has been serving unlimited breadsticks.

Not only does Lucy need to find her way back to 2024, she needs to save her sister Summer. Or does she? Lucy realizes if Summer survives, she'll never be born, presenting such a paradoxical conundrum, Lucy can't even summon the strength to tell her sister who she really is, much less reveal how savagely Summer is soon to be slaughtered. Setting things straight can wait a while though. First, let's see the sisters bond in a "why do you dress so weirdly?" makeover montage!

It needs to be noted "Time Cut" isn't just centered around high school students. The movie is tailored for teenagers. Anyone outside of the target demographic's sweet spot may be too busy counting copious Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, and Wheatus needle drops to ever get into the traditional slasher or sweetly sentimental sides of the story.

Curious staging might also rock a rickety boat of immersion in the film's fantasy. Like when Lucy finally tells Summer she's from the future, their subsequent interaction barely lasts more than a minute before Lucy abruptly leaves the room. I'm sorry, you just dropped an incredible bombshell, maybe you could stick around longer than 60 seconds and answer a couple of questions, yeah?

The positive impact of "Time Cut" cutting narrative corners, and possibly entire subplots, is the movie moves swiftly and consistently in the interest of maintaining a runtime under 90 minutes. There aren't many suspects for the murders, and there aren't many possible motives known to the viewer either, so guessing the killer's identity isn't much of a game. Especially when you look back at earlier events after certain reveals, the fiction doesn't fully hold up. It never does with time-travel treks or murder mysteries. You just have to accept certain leaps in logic and realize this isn't "Timecrimes" (review here) or "Knives Out." This is a fun-focused, breezy thriller for those who don't need their minds blown to be entertained.

Let's put it this way. If I had to sum up "Time Cut" in one word, I'd compliment the movie by calling it "cute." That's not a particularly attractive term for hardcore horror fans to hear, but everyone else who has no problem with a fright flick that feels like "Lizzie McGuire" decided to get dark with a PG-13 Halloween special should do just fine.

Review Score: 65

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