What would you do if you could go back in time? Where would you go? Would you change anything?
These are the questions the audience is left asking themselves when watching Netflix’s new movie “Time Cut,” released Oct. 31, 2024. Honestly, if I could time travel, I’d go back about an hour and a half and stop myself from watching this movie.
The film begins in 2003 when Summer Fields, played by Antonia Gentry, mourns the loss of her three best friends while at a high school party. Tragedy strikes when the Sweetly Slasher, the same masked killer that murdered her friends, appears to make her his next victim. Flashforward to present day, and the town is still recovering from the loss of the four high schoolers. On the anniversary of her sister’s death, teenager Lucy Fields, played by Madison Bailey, feels suffocated by her parents and hopes she’ll be allowed to leave for a summer internship with NASA.
Lucy’s relationship with her parents was one of the first issues I took with this movie, specifically because of the predictability. From the first minute on screen, it was clear that Lucy’s family dynamic was not good. Their dismissive attitude towards their daughter made it increasingly obvious that Lucy was just a failed attempt by her parents to replace the kid they had lost. Typically, this would be a great way to build a multi-dimensional and complex character, but with how little the parents appear in this film, it just felt like a cheap excuse to try and garner some sympathy from the audience.
After discovering a time machine in the exact same spot where her sister died, Lucy accidently travels back in time to 2003 — just days before her sister’s murder. Working together with Summer’s friend Quinn (Griffin Gluck), Lucy must find a way to not only get back to her current time but also stop the Sweetly Slasher before it’s too late.
If the premise of a time traveling serial killer sounds familiar to you, it should, because it's been done before. On Sept. 28, 2023, Amazon Prime released “Totally Killer,” which focuses on Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka) who accidently travels back in time to fight a masked killer who murdered her mother. Sent back to 1987, Jamie must work with the teenage version of her mom to stop the killer before it’s too late. From the premise of the films to the look of the killers, these two movies are so incredibly similar, I’m surprised Netflix didn’t mention “Totally Killer” in the end credits.
Where these two films differ is in their endings. In “Totally Killer” after defeating the murderer in 1987, Jamie travels back to her current time and faces the ramifications of changing a timeline. One of which is the introduction of an older brother named Jamie, meaning her name changed to Collette. It’s not a perfect ending but it is a clear one.
“Time Cut” took its ending in a whole other direction, one that most likely left viewers with a whole lot of questions. Like “Totally Killer,” it does address what happens to the future when you change the past. For Lucy, this means by saving her sister in 2003, her parents don’t know her in the present time, since they only had her to replace the daughter they had lost. She then makes the decision to go back to 2003 and live out the rest of her life there. And it’s in this ending that makes what I at first thought was only an overly predictable movie completely pointless.
The last couple of scenes are a montage of Lucy living her life in 2003 with a voice over from Lucy as she accepts the internship at NASA she was excited about receiving at the start of the film. While I think the intention was to end on a heartwarming note: Lucy living the life she never had before, it just comes across as vague and confusing.
The many plot holes on how Lucy exists once she is back in 2003 were so obvious that it was difficult to just relax and watch the movie. She’s not really part of Summer’s family as she hasn’t been born yet, and I have a hard time believing her parents would just accept that Lucy is their daughter from the future. It’s also unclear how Lucy gets her internship since she has zero records of living or going to school anywhere before 2003, a government agency isn’t going to accept a student into one of their programs just because her essay was kind of good.
When I finish a movie I don’t want to be left with more questions than I started with. So, while I can’t go back in time and not watch this film, take my advice and save yourself the hour and a half this overly predictable, confusing film takes up.
