‘Time Cut’ Review: A Failed Jump To Y2K

Madison Bailey and Antonia Gentry become sisters in Netflix’s Time Cut, a slasher taking us back to the era of Y2K.

The year is 2024, and a slasher film gets announced about a young girl travelling back in time to prevent the death of a loved one from a killer wearing a cheap mask. Sound familiar? That’s because Time Cut sounds like 2023’s Totally Killer. It feels like we’ve jumped back in time ourselves, and while I’ve not personally seen that film, it didn’t gain much praise when it was released. Time Cut was initially said to have plagiarised Totally Killer, but Time Cut was in production beforehand but ended up being the delayed. It’s easy to make a slasher film and hard to make a bad one, but it’s happened before, and it seems like history repeats itself as this film doesn’t offer much when it comes to its horror side.

Time Cut follows Lucy Field (Madison Bailey), an aspiring scientist who has recently just been approved for an internship with NASA. While she should be through the moon with this news, unfortunately it’s the anniversary of her sister, Summer Field’s (Antonia Gentry) death. Upon stumbling on a time travel machine, Lucy finds herself back in 2003 and realises that she has the opportunity to save her sister from being killed by a serial killer.

The concept of a slasher film being crossed over with time travel sounds compelling; it seems like it should be a recipe for success if done well, but it looks like there’s a long way to go before we can get that type of film. Time Cut opens up in 2003, introducing us to Summer, the mysterious serial killer, and showing us her unfortunate demise. The opening of the film slightly feels like the opening to a Scream movie, opening it up with a kill, but here are where the issues start with this film.

For a horror movie that’s slasher, it lacks a few components. In the UK, this film is rated a 15 and proves once again why the BBFC are so strict with their rating. Similar to Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Time Cut somehow manages to cut away each time someone gets killed, making it hard to believe that this is a slasher. When we get close to seeing someone get killed, there’s no sign of any blood until we see the body. There’s only two moments in the film where we see the kills happen, and it genuinely felt like a PG film with how the deaths were handled.

The dialogue and certain performances can feel bad at times, but overall, the strongest factor of this film is that the writing at least manages to focus on one thing if it’s not the horror. And that’s the relationship between Lucy and Summer. The chemistry between Madison and Antonia helps to bring this sibling relationship and surprisingly even brings forth stakes that you care about. While the climax of those stakes are not written well, it’s nice to see that there was some attempt to make a movie.

With Christopher Landon attached as a producer, I had some faith that this would be a fun, enjoyable film that plays around with the horror genre once again. Hannah Macpherson unfortunately doesn’t allow for this film to be any of that, making it more confusing why Landon attached himself to it. The film has no distinctive visual style; it feels like there’s no colour grading as it looks stale in colour throughout. Scenes that are in the dark are too dark, and scenes during the day just seem to only use the natural lighting and nothing more, which didn’t help for the look of the movie.

It’s good that the story does well in fleshing out the sisterly relationship between Lucy and Summer; it even does well with Summer’s character development, allowing for her to be an interesting character, but for the overall story, it’s slightly disappointing. From the opening moments of the film, without me giving away too much here, you can guess who the killer will be and who people will think is the killer. This isn’t only down to the writing but also to the casting of these characters, which feels like they’ve been typecast. It’s predictable and fails to subvert expectations with a lacklustre reveal and climax to the movie.

Time Cut is a mediocre attempt at combining the horrors of a slasher film with the fun and adventure of a time travel movie. It fits the setting of 2003 well with nicely placed callbacks and jokes; it also delivers with amazing chemistry from Madison Bailey and Antonia Gentry, who build this strong sibling bond in a movie where all else fails. With Halloween around the corner, this is not a film that can be recommended to get all the scares and blood you’d want from a slasher movie.

Time Cut is streaming now on Netflix.