Limp time travel slasher Time Cut trades blood for needle drops

Limp Time Travel Slasher Time Cut Trades Blood for Perfunctory Needle Drops

Listen to this article

The architecture of the classical American slasher film has become so widely appropriated in recent years that it has arguably been stripped of some of its elemental power, as far too many middling screenplays seem to have been run through some kind of genre-squishing engine as they search for a hook that will allow a movie to get made. There’s no easier or more baseline effective way to punch up one of those scripts than to “make it horror,” and it feels like that has occurred with particularly tepid results in new Netflix sci-fi slasher Time Cut, a film that can’t boast even the slightest interest in delivering genuine horror beats. What we have here instead is a warmed-over piece of time travel nostalgia bait; a film that seems to have figured out its needle drops first and then hoped everything else would fall into place behind them. Perhaps for a very narrow spectrum of elder millennials there’s a ravenous market for a film that dares to fondly remember high school life in 2003, but all other horror fans will be left behind like so many bucket hats and studded belts.

It’s not that a streamer like Netflix is inherently antithetical to platforming a great, modern slasher in this vein, either. Just a few years ago, director Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy provided an ambitiously off-the-wall tribute to the genre, steeped in deeply knowledgeable inversion of classic tropes and genuinely gnarly kills. Time Cut doesn’t even attempt to compete with that dynamic, and slasher geeks in particular will have a hard time not noting the similarity in the “girl travels back in time to stop killer targeting her family” premise to 2023’s Totally Killer on Amazon Prime. That film featured another (nearly identical) masked killer and a fish-out-of-water protagonist thrust into the past, and it’s little comfort to note that Time Cut actually went into production well before Totally Killer–if anything, you end up unsurprised that Time Cut was shelved for so long, as it’s easy to imagine producer concerns that the film fails to function as either a halfway scary teen slasher or a family driven sci-fi quasi comedy.

Most Popular

Madison Bailey stars as Lucy Field, a girl who discovers a fully functional time machine near the site where her older sister was killed by the world’s blandest and most indistinct mask-wearing slasher killer two decades earlier. Accidentally traveling back to 2003, shortly before the murder spree, she must befriend Summer (Antonia Gentry), the sister she’s never known, and solve the mystery that led to her death, while also contending with the butterfly effect-style blowback this could have for her own timeline and very existence.

Time Cut is easily at its best when functioning as a sort of sci-fi tinged family dramedy, particularly in the painful way it makes Lucy contend with how the death of Summer transformed her weary parents and the family dynamic, robbing them of their vitality. Our protagonist is a repressed bookworm who has never truly been afforded an opportunity to be her own person, with parents so hung up on the traumatic murder of their first daughter that 20 years later, they still won’t let Lucy out of their sight or allow her to experience the events that would stimulate her own, unique growth. Every second of her life has been in the shadow of someone she’s never met, and even at home, Summer’s room has been kept perfectly preserved as a pink time capsule, complete with newspaper clippings about the murder. Sure, what parent wouldn’t want to commemorate that moment in their lives, front and center? Traveling into the past, meanwhile, only twists the knife deeper for Lucy, as she’s given a chance to see how her more warm, supportive parents functioned before tragedy upended them–and becomes increasingly convinced that without the death of Summer, she never would have been conceived. These are at least paradoxes that are fun to momentarily consider.

This might have been able to make for an intriguing time travel dramedy all on its own, but Time Cut needs to sell its audience on a teen slasher premise as well, and this is where it immediately falls flat on its face. It barely commits to depicting its killer and gives this figure absolutely nothing to make him stand out–just the most generic mask imaginable. Zero creativity is applied toward the small handful of genuine kills, most of which are squeamishly photographed to avoid showing much of anything. The entirety of the horror material feels like it’s here under protest, in stark contrast to the likes of Fear Street, which dared to do things like run a girl’s head through a bread slicer in shocking detail. Time Cut’s deaths, on the other hand, have a net negative impact–even in the final death of the villain, who goes out in a way so understated, dull and thoughtless that it feels like the actual death scene has somehow been cut for time.

What Time Cut actually cares about, on the other hand, is evoking the suddenly nostalgic world of the early 2000s for its millennial target audience, and at the very least the fashion seems to be on point, if perhaps a little on the exaggerated side. The needle drops come fast and furious (another film these 2003 kids would no doubt have cherished), though they hew pretty closely to top-of-the-charts pop from the likes of Vanessa Carlton, Hillary Duff and Avril Lavigne, with little cameos from the likes of Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag.” Notably absent: What any of the alternative, indie or emo kids were listening to in 2003, as Timecut has a pop-only mandate. These songs feel cynically calculated for pure recognition, needle drops for needle drop sake–10 seconds of nostalgia, and then on to the next. The film misses its chance to incorporate any of its licensed music in a clever way, or integrate it in the lives of these characters, not one of whom ever even makes reference to a single tune. It all serves no purpose beyond designating the film’s presumed target demo, harried late-30s parents and their kids, who want to relive the glory days of … 20 years ago.

Like an unstable particle of antimatter–which beyond all reason becomes a major plot point, if you can believe that–Time Cut begins to rapidly deteriorate in legibility in its third act, before spinning totally out of control. All we’re left with is 2003 Butterfinger candy product placement, mildly intriguing consideration of paradoxes and the occasional joke about noisy internet modems. For a lightweight time travel comedy, that might almost have sufficed, but any attempt to brand this as a slasher film without any subsequent follow up ultimately dooms it to be tossed into the dustbin of history.

Director: Hannah MacPherson
Writers: Michael Kennedy, Hannah MacPherson
Stars: Madison Bailey, Antonia Gentry, Griffin Gluck
Release Date: Oct. 30, 2024 (Netflix)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

Limp Time Travel Slasher Time Cut Trades Blood for Perfunctory Needle Drops