USA, 2024
Review:
Joseph Henson
I love a good time travel movie paradox. One of my favorites - and the tried and true conundrum of films that bend the space-time continuum - is the "grandfather paradox," or simply, "you can't go back and kill Hitler, because then what would be your reason for time traveling to begin with?" Robert Heinlein often did us one better by making the time traveler him(or her)self the very catalyst for the event in which they're trying to stop. Netflix's TIME CUT plays around with both concepts of time paradoxes with some success, its biggest being the identity of the killer, which totally caught me off guard. The rest feels like beats of a story with no context to make it all pop: that, and whoever scored and edited this together needed a time machine to correct their mistakes, or at least a strong cup of coffee before beginning the editing process.
In April of 2003, in the small (fictional) town of Sweetly, a mad slasher (The Sweetly Slasher) is about to take four lives, one of which is young, teenaged Summer (Antonia Gentry), who is currently experiencing some sort of relationship malaise that isn't made explicitly clear, and before it can, Summer is killed by a hoodie-wearing, masked slasher at a party held in a barn. Cut to 2024, and the town of Sweetly is now a sullen wreck, with the late Summer's parents having partially moved on with a new child: Lucy (Madison Bailey), now teenaged in 2024 and living under the stifling shadow of her late sister, consistently reprimanded for wanting to leave town for a better life (as a Nasa internist). One day, while snooping in her late sister's bedroom, Lucy discovers a scornful note hidden in the floorboards by her late sister, having been written by what appears to be the 2003 school bully, Ethan (Samuel Braun), for a romantic slight of some kind. Thinking little of it, Lucy later attends the spot of her sister's brutal murder to vicariously pay her (parents') respect, where she accidentally discovers a time machine that, yes, sends her back just days before her sister and a couple of her peers are killed by a mysterious psychopath. Once in 2003, Lucy wrestles with the idea of telling her sister, who she never knew, that she is destined to die, while also wrestling with her own mortality, or rather a fundamental lack of it should she decide to break the news.
TIME CUT begins and ends breathlessly, and therein lies the problem: the middle portion is something of a slog that has all of the pieces of an exceptional puzzle in place but trusts said pieces to someone who can't get the corners to fit. What hurts the film the most is a lack of a proper score, often feeling as if there's not one at all, and the pacing is often stymied by slipshod sequentialism. Often it feels as if Character A needs to meet Character B at Location C at 12:45 PM and they can only do so because the script says as much; there's never any real lead-up or organic motion toward specific plot reveals or events, everything just happens in an "oh, okay" sort of way - a shame, because TIME CUT plays around with some of my favorite time travel paradoxes, and I think letting the characters properly ruminate on the bugaboos therein would have derived some clutch suspense. Instead, characters stumble upon these massive (and life-altering) revelations with an "aw shucks" approach, which certainly helps in making the characters affable and tolerable if not smart and memorable. The one character who understands, even partially, the ramifications of the events in the film is often relegated to making snide remarks or waiting around to spout needless exposition. It's quite frustrating. I think of and love films that understand the urgency of a paradox by getting tangled up with them, not by making cute quips at their expense.
As a slasher film, the opening portion stings properly, with an effective chase sequence through a barn party, with the noise of 2003 pop hits drowning out the screams of the victim being chased an effective touch. The film also ends well as a slasher, revealing the identity of the killer in a time-loopy plot twist that pays homage to some of the best ontological paradoxes put to paper (or film, in this case); in fact, it's these last twenty minutes where the characters begin to fully understand and accept their predicament where the film does its best work, giving us that wicked killer reveal and a good chase climax leading up to it (one scene with the characters climbing out of a house for safety is tops), and some fun is had with characters who once died getting to live, and characters who once died, dying all over again. If only the middle portion had been... I don't know, unafraid of taking chances on its characters making discoveries on their own, and acting accordingly because of. Everything feels slapped together for too much of the run time to leave any lasting impression, and the needle-drop moments that should inspire an adrenaline rush or punctuate moments of suspense just aren't present. It all looks great and has the proper gloss you'd expect from a Netflix production, but also comparisons to the more popular TOTALLY KILLER (2023) will offer no favors to casual viewers. Though, it is my (rudimentary) understanding that TIME CUT was in production hell for nearly two years prior to TOTALLY KILLER. Still, the similarities (even the killer looks nearly identical) may disturb some viewers who aren't aware of TIME CUT's checkered history.
TIME CUT is a perfectly okay piece of Netflix bubblegum slasher, but it could have so easily been more. My best advice? Enjoy the opening scene, hope you accidentally discover a time machine in a barn, and skip ahead to the last riveting twenty minutes. But then if you did that, would my words telling you to do so even exist?
BODY COUNT 8:
Female 4 / Male 4
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Trailer for BOOGEYMAN 2 (2007)