Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Hannah Macpherson
Starring: Madison Bailey, Antonia Gentry, Michael Shanks, Griffin Gluck
Time Cut revolves around a teenage girl who travels back in
time to stop the serial killer who will go on to target her family. If
that premise sounds familiar then you've likely seen
Totally Killer, which was released on Prime Video for Halloween 2023. Both movies have
the exact same premise and share so many plot details (some miniscule)
that you might smell plagiarism; even the killers' masks are almost
identical. Time Cut was actually filmed back in 2021, which frees
it from such allegations. Arriving a year after
Totally Killer doesn't do director
Hannah Macpherson's film any favours though, as it's by far the
weaker of the two movies.
In Totally Killer, the teen protagonist stumbled upon a time machine that sent her back
to the '80s where she endeavoured to stop a serial killer who would
eventually target her mother. In Time Cut the '80s is
swapped out for the noughties and it's our hero's sister whose life must
be saved.
In 2003 a group of teens are murdered, including Lucy (Antonia Gentry), by a masked killer who is never caught. A couple of years later
Lucy's childless parents have a second daughter, Summer. In the present
we find Summer (Madison Bailey) is now a science wiz who is about
to graduate from high school and take up an internship with NASA. When
Summer comes across a time machine hidden in a barn, she accidentally
gets sent back to the day of the first murder in 2003. Teaming up with
bullying victim and fellow science nerd Quinn (Griffin Gluck),
Summer attempts to stop the killer and save the sister she never
knew.
Time Cut is ostensibly a horror comedy, one that comes in
a wave of movies that have taken a comic premise and thrown a slasher
into the mix. In fact, it's co-written by Michael Kennedy, whose
Freaky
reworked the body-swap comedy Freaky Friday as a
slasher movie, and is produced by Christopher Landon, whose
Happy Death Day
(Groundhog Day with a slasher) is the best example of the
form so far. Kennedy and Landon have both demonstrated that they know
how to make this work by striking the right balance between laughs and
thrills, so it's a surprise to find them involved with a movie that
works as neither a slasher movie nor a comedy.
As a horror movie Time Cut is completely lacking in any
tension or suspense, and Macpherson displays no aptitude for
constructing thrilling set-pieces. The kills are mildly inventive in
theory but are executed in a bloodless, largely offscreen manner that
suggests the movie may have been trimmed by Netflix to make it more
sleepover friendly. Where similar efforts like
Happy Death Day, Freaky and
It's a Wonderful Knife
took their visual cues from slasher movies, Time Cut has
the appearance of a Nickelodeon show.
There are surprisingly few laughs, with the cast playing the whole
thing with a straight face. Where Totally Killer mined
gags from the idea of a Gen-Z teen clashing with '80s life, there simply
isn't enough of a cultural gulf between 2003 and 2024 to make this fish
out of water comedy land. The film actually strains to create a cultural
chasm that isn't really there, with Summer getting a 2003 makeover that
wouldn't make her stand out today and a joke about her smartphone that
seems to forget that by 2003 everyone had a cellphone capable of taking
photos and accessing the internet, albeit in rudimentary form. One of
the chief reasons why culture has been in stasis is the lack of
evolution in popular music, which sounds pretty much the same today as
in 2003 (thanks largely to Bill Clinton and the Telecommunications Act of 1996), so the "vintage" needle drops here fail
to act as signifiers in the same way a tune from 1987 takes you back to an
era that's practically alien now.
One of the few ways we've progressed in the last two decades is in our
softening of homophobia, which was still relatively rampant in 2003, and one
of Time Cut's better moments sees Summer reassure her closeted sister that while
there's still much work to do, things are going to get better. What's most
interesting about Time Cut is how it acknowledges that no
matter how bad we think the present is, the past was always objectively
worse. Another intriguing notion the film brings up is how one childhood
incident can determine the sort of adult someone eventually becomes,
suggesting that rather than killing baby Hitler, the world might be saved by
setting him on a brighter path. There are brief digressions when
Time Cut becomes downright melancholy as it wrestles with such
weighty ideas, but it's too concerned with neatly wrapping everything up to
really dive into any deep philosophical waters.
Time Cut is on Netflix from
October 30th.
