On October 30, Netflix released the fantastic teen slasher «Time Cut», which picks up the trend of recent years of adding some familiar trope from other genres to horror stories about masked maniacs. In this case, for example, it’s time travel. In the review below, we will tell you how a modern teenager would feel back in 2003 and how interesting it is to watch another murderer with a knife in his hand, who decided to chase carefree youth.
Genre sci-fi slasher
Director Anna Macpherson
Starring Madison Bailey, Antonia Gentry, Griffin Gluck, Michael Shanks, Rachel Crawford, Jordan Petl, Megan Best, Samuel Brown
Premiere Netflix
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb
April 2003. Despite the deaths of several students who fell victim to a mysterious masked killer, high school students in a Minnesota town decided to throw a big party. It’s about the same as the one in the slasher crossover «Freddy vs. Jason», which was released in the same year, 2003. Only the local rustic flavor is limited to some abandoned barn instead of entertainment among the abundant cornfields. Schoolgirl Summer Field also attends this event, but it will be the last one for her, as a psychopath with a knife (or rather, this time with a scythe) gets to her.
21 years later, Summer’s younger sister, Lucy, goes with her inconsolable parents to honor the memory of the deceased. Suddenly, at the murder scene, she discovers a strange device — a real-time machine. Before she can fully understand what is happening, she is transported back to the fateful year of 2003 when her sister was still alive. Now Lucy is determined to save her doomed relative and find out the identity of the maniac. But will she succeed in realizing her plans?
Watching «Time Cut», it’s hard to get rid of the unpleasant thought that its plot contains exactly zero fresh ideas and is entirely woven from typical genre clichés. And these thoughts rightly arise even before the screening. The authors of the film try to follow the trends of modern slashers, when a trope from other genres is added to the usual masked maniac and a bunch of schoolchildren who die at his hands one by one.
Fingers crossed: in «The Final Girls» (2015), the inherent «Screams» meta-narrative; in «Happy Death Day» (2017), the creators appealed to the concept of «Groundhog Day»; in «Freaky» (2020), they referred to the exchange of bodies; in «It’s A Wonderful Knife» (2023), they talked about parallel universes, and it was also a reinterpretation of the Christmas classic «It’s a Wonderful Life» by Frank Capra (1946).
Michael Kennedy wrote the scripts for two of the four aforementioned horror films, so it’s not surprising to see him among the writers of «Time Cut» (next year, «Heart Eyes» — a romcom-diluted slasher, which Kennedy also had a hand in creating, is scheduled for release).
Accordingly, numerous signs of that time appear in the frame. The local girls’ style of dress resembles the characters in the comedy «Mean Girls». Pink headphones connected to a CD player play Avril Lavigne’s youth hits. A poster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is on the wall. The young time traveler is frightened by the noise made by the modem. On the computer monitor, Windows XP is easily guessed. And to finish someone off with a piece of CD It was much easier than than it is today.
Add a direct mention of «American Psycho» or surname Myersand you get a really nice nostalgic vibe with references. But at the same time, this is almost the only good thing about the movie.
If, for example, the scenario «Venom: The Last Dance» was written on a napkin, the story of «Time Cut» was clearly invented by a neural network, and «invented» can be considered a euphemism here. Where the same «Totally Killer» added appropriate comedic levity to the story, the new Netflix novelty is completely serious and even attempts to be a teen drama, but these dramatic efforts look ridiculous. And, let’s be honest, with so much blood on the screen, it’s hard to call this a full-fledged slasher.
As a result, the viewer is confronted with secondary, lazy, and ultimately ordinary teenage nonsense, whose only sane thought is that the grass really was greener back then. No wonder one of the characters decides to ignore the miserable current timeline and stay in that wonderful 2003.