Time Cut (now on Netflix) is a combination slasher/time-travel flick starring Madison Bailey and Antonia Gentry as sisters who meet each other for the first time when one travels back in time to prevent the other’s murder. Perhaps this goes without saying: It’s complicated. So yes, this is one of those plots that takes us down to the paradox city where the grass is green and the implications on the space-time continuum are potentially disastrous, but can director Hannah MacPherson and her co-writer Michael Kennedy (Freaky) take us hoooooo-ooome?
TIME CUT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: SWEETLY, MINNESOTA, APRIL 18, 2003. Three high-schoolers have just been slashed up by a slasher killer, and yet, the spring fling show must go on. Summer Field (Gentry) isn’t too happy about this – those three high-schoolers were her friends and nobody but the sweet dweeb in a D&D shirt, Quinn (Griffin Gluck), gives a dang. Almost immediately after Summer says “seems like I’m the only one who’s afraid of a serial killer,” she goes off all alone to the bathroom, which is a terrible decision, because the slasher killer in a Ken (or at least Kenlike) mask and hoodie comes after her with a Rambo (or at least Rambolike) knife. He misses, so he chases her into a barn where there’s a reaper’s (or at least reaperlike) scythe propped up against a wall. He doesn’t miss this time.
Now it’s APRIL 18, 2024. Lucy Field (Bailey) landed an internship at NASA, but her parents aren’t so sure about letting her go have an amazing astronaut life or whatever. See, they’ve been really overprotective since Summer got scythed 21 years ago. Summer’s room is a time capsule of 2003 complete with a Buffy poster, CD boombox and newspaper clippings about the murder, which is something they wouldn’t save if they were of sound mind, but what do I know? I’m no psychologist. The Sweetly Slasher never killed anyone again and the murders remain unsolved, but there’s a loose floorboard in Summer’s room and beneath it are handwritten letters that seem like capital-C Clues. She and Mother and Father Field (why didn’t they name their second daughter Spring Field? Blown opportunity) venture to the site of the murder to pay respects on the anniversary, and Lucy wanders into a barn and stumbles across a time machine and zappo, she’s shot back to APRIL 16, 2003. Now, if you’re curious as to exactly why this happens, I recommend not asking, because even though it’s eventually explained, it’s not at all satisfying. Just go with it, is what I’m saying.
Anyway. You’re doing some math now. If Lucy is a senior in 2024 and Summer was a senior in 2003, then Mother and Father Field may have conceived their second daughter in a frenzy of grief, and possibly with some medicinal help, since two-plus decades between children is unusual. Don’t worry, I won’t go further down that hole because there’s too many spoilers in it – very stupid spoilers. She finds Quinn, and since he’s a “physics genius,” she tells him about the time travel inconvenience, and after he says “What’s Twitter” and “Is Paris Hilton still hot” he agrees to help her, first by feeding her a popular name-brand candy bar whose logo is the subject of the movie’s finest photography, and then, by warning her of the potential disruption of timeline continuity if she follows through on her attempt to prevent the Sweetly Slasher from sweetly slashing her sister. While she contemplates that, she futzes with things anyway by meeting Summer and hanging with their parents, creating some complicated feelings and allowing for some insane dialogue, such as “I’m your sister. I just haven’t been born yet” and “We’re not altering the future, we’re just giving it a makeover, like in She’s All That” and “Let’s go steal some antimatter!” Now, if only Time Cut was as much fun as I’m making it out to be. So it goes, I guess. So it goes.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Time Cut really really wants to be Back to the Future meets Scream, but Totally Killer executed this premise far more amusingly, and with fewer trips to the popular soup-and-breadsticks restaurant whose logo is the subject of the movie’s second-most fine photography. It also feels like Netflix trying to replicate the success of Fear Street and/or The Babysitter.
Performance Worth Watching: Bailey and Gentry are excellent actors who share one Nice Moment as long-lost sisters who yearn for things. But they’re far too often stuck in a dumbass sloppo plot that does them no favors.
Memorable Dialogue: Quinn buzzkills by invoking ye olde butterfly effect:
Summer: We need to do something!
Quinn: Doing something in this context is extremely subjective. We could save a life. We also might start World War III!
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: With a little elbow grease, Time Cut could’ve been a real mindbender that wavers wildly between amusing nostalgia-fetishism and dark existential ruminations. We have Wheatus needle drops and outrageous oughties fashion mingling with Lucy’s realization that, if she prevents her sister’s death, her parents likely won’t try to have another kid. And that means her. She might find herself in the great nothingness of unexistence, it seems. How selfless is she? What are her options? What’s her life worth? There are so many questions, and so little interest in where they lead, because there’s a jank-ass plot here, and it clearly takes precedence over all those boring ideas. I mean, who wants to think about things around here? Thinking is for squares, man.
And so the film blows past one creatively lucrative opportunity after another, like they’re orange cones in a construction zone. Time Cut consists of piles of period-specific references sans humor, heavy drama without depth and characters without much going on in their interior lives. Example: A scene in which an American Psycho DVD is used as a weapon would’ve been much, much funnier if the killer pulled the disc out of a red Netflix mailer envelope. This is also the type of movie where a third-act confrontation in 2024 absolutely must involve some piece of era-specific ephemera, so an electric-car charger ends up being used as a blunt weapon. Is that a joke? I think it’s supposed to be. Now, having the character use a same-sex marriage license as a blunt weapon? That’d be funny.
This is a long way of saying that Time Cut is lazy and it sucks. Visually, it’s flat and dull, like cheapo cable TV. And the screenplay is such a mess, it compromises comedy and drama on either tonal end, landing on middle-of-the-road bland mush that feels tamed for younger audiences, and a slapped-together, underexplained conclusion that would be utterly batshit if I typed it out, but in execution comes off as a big ol’ shrug. Any opportunity the filmmakers had to extract any fun from the premise seems to have been hurdled just to get this thing over with. Viewers will surely feel the same.
Our Call: Time Butt. Way too easy, I know. But fitting. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
