Riding the coattails of 2023’s Totally Killer, Netflix dumps us back into the time-traveling teen horror blender with Time Cut (2024). Swapping streaming platforms this time around hasn’t shaken up the formula: both movies fling a high school girl through a temporal wormhole to outwit a bloodthirsty killer before the body count spikes. To be honest, it's not a bad one, even if it’s just playing a cover tune you know by heart and could hum in your sleep.
Two sisters are torn apart by a shining time portal, thrusting them into a game of cat-and-mouse with fate itself. The story ignites at a party in 2003 in the town of Sweetly, where the air is thick with cheap beer fumes in the aftermath of the Sweetly Slasher, a masked menace whose knife has already carved a bloody legacy through the town’s teens. The kids wrestle with the grim, unshakable reality of their friends’ deaths. At the heart of it all is Summer (Antonia Gentry), snuffed out when she becomes the Slasher’s next victim.
Fast-forward to the present, where the 20th anniversary of Summer’s gruesome death casts a heavy shadow. Lucy (Bailey Madison), a sister Summer never knew, stands solemnly and silently with their parents at the murder site, as grief and unsaid words fill the air.
The vigil’s somber quiet is shattered when Lucy spots a flicker of light pulsing mysteriously from a nearby barn. Curiosity overriding caution, she goes to investigate when a surge of energy swallows her whole, hurling her through a time portal to the neon-soaked, danger-laced world of 2003, before her sister’s untimely death at the hands of the Slasher.
The movie serves up a typical plate of teen horror tropes with a side of time-travel shenanigans, and while it’s not rewriting the formula, it’s got just enough heart to keep you hooked. After being catapulted back to 2003, Lucy scrambles to quickly navigate a whole new world, blending into this new environment and racing against the clock to save her sister Summer from the Sweetly Slasher’s blade. The real mind-bender? Unexpectedly bumping into her own parents in another time-period.
The movie lands a decent stab at the slasher horror genre, despite being dragged down by a predictable playbook. However, it has one conflicting element: a refreshingly sharp-witted crew who, for the most part, manage to dodge the usual horror-movie stupidity we’ve come to expect and are actually likable.
We can’t really throw the same praise the slasher’s way. The Sweetly Slasher, sadly, is about as scary as a discount Halloween mask, with a design so bland it could blend into a crowd of soccer moms. The kills? Slashes that barely raise a pulse, never really sticking and lacking any real creativity to grab attention or leave an impact.
Time Cut fumbles the ball in the time-travel end zone, and it's a shame. After Lucy’s wild ride through the 2003 portal, the time-bending gimmick takes a back seat, missing chances that could’ve raised the stakes or added a whole new dimension to push things further. Worse still, the ending leaves you dangling like a cliffhanger in a canceled series. Here’s hoping the next swing at time-hop horror sharpens its claws and delivers what Time Cut manages to only tease, until then, it’s a fun stab at slasher glory.