Hannah Macpherson’s “Time Cut” rehashes a slasher thriller and a time travel trope to painfully boring, contrived ends. The writing recycles every conceivable cliché and emotions dry up quickly, despite a pretty big sentimental hook to the narrative. Buried deep within is a story of sisters finding a connection. There’s scope for trauma addressing and coming to terms with grief but the film barely steps into it. Instead what we get is an overwrought yet anemic film that reverse-engineers temporalities only to render a flat, unconvincing, and wooden plotline.
The screenplay piles on a series of convenient narrative turns that don’t even latch onto a plausible thread. There’s no attempt made to spin a decent explanation, though we gauge gestures being made towards it through introducing a company that has link-ups with the time machine. It’s all very casually hamstrung a plot with the passage of time being made to expressly reflect on the clothes and technology.
This has to be spelled out by the film, besides a contrast between the present-day bleak color palette and a bright, shiny past. The filmmaking is lazy, saddled with a slop of generic imagination in fleshing out emotionally driven scenes. The performances too are in the mold of sleepwalking. Madison Bailey flashes an anguished expression throughout. There’s no palpable danger we feel despite a lurking serial killer.
Time Cut (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Exploring Time Travel and Tension in a Flawed Serial Killer Thriller
A serial killer-centric tale must at least keep you nervous and apprehensive. Of course, here we already know who gets killed right off the cuff. So that scope for nervous, dread-infused anticipation doesn’t exactly boil to the surface. Here, the murders are sought to be stopped. Time travel factors in heavily, though the science and logic behind it are mostly missing.
There’s a lot of reiterated emphasis on not messing with the temporal flow of events and circumstances, as it might send off a vast, uncontrollable ripple effect. There might be a series of paradoxes set off in the process. How can one circumvent the passage of time when one is aware of the immense repercussions that could be triggered? The price might be unfathomably steep. The film invokes this several times but shows no acumen to probe it with any intelligence or depth.
Can Lucy’s Discovery of the Time Machine Change Her Sister’s Fate?
“Time Cut” opens in April of 2003. A serial killer, the Sweetly Slasher, is on the loose. Summer Field (Antonia Gentry) has two of her friends killed. She is grieving the loss but can’t really share the depth of it with anyone. She escapes a party only to run into a cabin where she gets attacked and subsequently killed by the masked slasher.
The film jumps twenty years following these events. The town is hollowed out. The vibrance of life has gone missing. Everything looks bleached of vivacity and life. We meet Summer’s sister, Lucy (Madison Bailey). The parents’ grief is still fresh. They adopted her to recover from the loss. But her life is severely curtailed in the fear that they might lose her as well. She lands a NASA internship. However, she knows her parents wouldn’t welcome the idea of going away on her own to a faraway place even if for a few months.
A peculiar twist occurs in the film. She and her parents arrive to put fresh flowers on the anniversary of Summer’s death. She strays to a cabin nearby where she comes across a curious machine, tucked away. It has these flares. She tinkers with it and lands in the past. It’s April of 2003. The machine is a time travel conduit.
Can Lucy and Quinn Outwit Time to Save Summer and Her Friends from the Sweetly Slasher?
Lucy ventures to her school, hoping to find a familiar face in her physics teacher. She is introduced to the resident physics nerd Quinn (Griffin Gluck). It’s his trust she first garners. She convinces him she is from the future. Since he is already invested in the mechanics of time travel, it isn’t a mighty hard task, given she also shows him her share of tech. She also meets Summer at school. Quinn suggests that she do Summer’s homework when Summer asks him for help. Lucy tells him everything about her family history though she holds back on the entire list of the deaths.
Quinn insists she doesn’t meddle with the course of events, pressing on her the fact it might set off too many paradoxes in motion. But she is determined. She paces to the mall to save Val and Brian, friends of Summer. She is almost able to rescue one of them but loses both to the killer. What shakes her up is that there’s another casualty in the death of a security guard who tried to intervene and got attacked.
Summer finally decides to believe in Lucy, once she gets proof. It’s she who insists on Lucy and they save Emmy, who is the next victim. The trio heads to the marine museum where Emmy works the evening shift. They arrive just in the nick of time and extricate her from the clutches of the killer. Lucy discovers Summer is romantically drawn to Emmy but cannot quite own up to it. Gradually Summer picks the courage as Emmy also likes her.
Time Cut (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Will Lucy’s Sacrifice Secure a New Future for Her and Summer?
Lucy is conflicted about saving Summer since it also might ensure she doesn’t have her own future. Ultimately her sisterly love prevails as she concocts a plan. On the fateful day, just about Summer enters the cabin where she would get attacked by the killer, Lucy and Quinn ram a car at him, impeding his advance. He is immobilized temporarily but not killed.
The killer is revealed to be a future version of Quinn from another timeline, one in which Lucy wasn’t there to be a safe space for him amidst the bullying he faced at school. He also couldn’t stomach being rejected by Summer. Lucy drags the future Quinn into the future where she kills him. But she returns to the past, where she can be with her sister and the unsullied Quinn. In the end, which is a happy one, she applies for a NASA internship in 2003, surrounded and bolstered by family and love.
