Time Cut (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – High school student accidentally travels back to 2003 and decides to stop the serial killer who murdered her sister.

My Take – Considering his work on the delicious thriller Disturbia (2007), the better Paranormal Activity sequels and delightful horror comedies like Happy Death Day (2017), Happy Death Day 2U (2019), and Freaky (2020), writer, producer and director Christopher Landon has proven himself to be a staple in the horror genre, bringing his own unique flair to every venture.

Perhaps, that’s what surprised me most to see his name attached as a producer to this ho-hum teen offering from Netflix, which despite being billed as a slasher with time travel shenanigans plays almost like a bad Scary Film parody.

Simply told, this Hannah MacPherson directorial, which she co-wrote with Michael Kennedy (Freaky, It’s a Wonderful Knife) and is releasing four years after production completed, fails to work both as a horror film and a science fiction film.

Working mostly as a collection of wasted ideas and potential, the script is so increasingly fatigued that the third act can only be described as anticlimactic and unsatisfactory.

To make matters worse, the whole narrative is almost identical to that of last year’s very enjoyable ‘Totally Killer‘ which saw Kiernan Shipka play a high schooler who travels back to the 80s before her mother gets killed by a madman.

Yes, the biggest value it has here is the nostalgia effect, especially if you’re a Millennial and were a teenager in 2003. And there are a couple of moments where it looks like it might go somewhere interesting, but then it backs away from these ideas almost as soon as it presents them. Resulting in something that will be remembered as one of the worst films of 2024.

Beginning in 2003, a period in which four teenagers were murdered by a masked killed, dubbed the Sweetly Slasher, who ended his rampage by killing Summer (Antonia Gentry), the final victim. Moving forward go 2024, the story follows high schooler Lucy (Madison Bailey), younger sister to Summer, born sometime after the killings. With the killer never being caught, Lucy lives her life in the wreckage. Even the once vibrant town is a shell of its formal self, most of its businesses shuttered.

But worst of all Lucy’s parents (Michael Shanks and Rachael Crawford) seem stuck in a joyless helicopter pattern. Even when she wins a summer internship at NASA, they can only suggest the lab where her father works instead, closer to home.

However, things take a massive turn when on the family’s annual pilgrimage to the shrine they’ve built where Summer died, Lucy stumbles upon a time machine inside a nearby barn which transports her back to 2003, few days before Summer gets killed.

Now, Lucy must decide whether to not change the future to ensure the continuity of her existence or save her sister and stop the killer. Once there, she meets and befriends her sister and joined by Quinn (Griffin Gluck), the resident nerd and physics genius, becomes determined to change the future.

As I mentioned earlier, the film relies heavily on nostalgia, but there’s only so much that velour tracksuits and CD players can do and it’s only in one briefly poignant scene, in which the sisters discuss the evolution of queer acceptance, that story delivers something vaguely original in this deeply unoriginal set-up which blows past one creatively lucrative opportunity after another.

The biggest problem here is that the writing is just not ambitious. Both the slasher and time-travel portions are defined by laziness. They aspire to the bare minimum of function, lacking the ambition for fun or creativity required to stand out in either genre.

As a slasher, it is much too tame and generic with bland, bloodless kills and a thoroughly unremarkable killer. The character’s design has an unfortunate resemblance to that of last year’s Totally Killer, but with a less inspiring execution, which leaves it fairly toothless.

The kills don’t even get a decent buildup, there’s no suspense, and even scenes of our protagonists creeping through a dark museum fail to work as the obvious attempts at jump scares fall flat.

Even the mechanics of the time machine are breezed through in clunky exposition and technobabble. But neither have any real bearing on the story. There are zero tense moments, the sisters bonding lacks any impact, the serial killer’s reveal is lame and the reason for the killings is indeed laughable.

Netflix’s in-house stars Madison Bailey, Antonia Gentry and Griffin Gluck all give decent performance, but are marred by a terrible script. On the whole, ‘Time Cut‘ is a damp squib of slasher that is just too bland, gimmicky and over-familiar.