Time Cut review – tinny time-travel Netflix slasher offers too much deja vu

The triumphant return of the slasher movie, a subgenre that had been mostly dead and buried for far too long, arrived with key caveats. Those that were now being made were either part of a legacy franchise (updates to Scream or Halloween or next year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer) or were hinged on a goofy gimmick. We had time loops (the Happy Death Day series), time travel (Totally Killer), timeline jumping (the excellent Fear Street trilogy), alternate realities (It’s a Wonderful Knife) or body swapping (the underrated Freaky), brash genre-bending variations that all seemed a little reticent to rely solely on the base pleasures of the formula.

What had seemed inventive at the outset has started to become predictably repetitive, as evidenced by Netflix’s ho-hum teen offering Time Cut, a film that almost feels like the Scary Movie parody of this recent trend. To be fair to those behind it, it was filmed back in 2021 (it has that familiar, 10-person crowd Covid movie vibe) but even if its conceit were fresher, there’s not enough else here to merit that prized Halloween viewing slot. Keep scrolling.

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In a 2003-set cold open that tells us everything we need to know about what’s to come – bad lighting, zero suspense, nostalgic needle-drop – we see the high schooler Summer (Ginny & Georgia’s Antonia Gentry) get murdered by a masked killer, the latest in what we’re told is a spree targeting her friends. We leap forward to 2024 and her sister Lucy (Outer Banks’s Madison Bailey) is still dealing with the loss. They never met, she was born just two years after, but the house is still haunted – her room an untouched shrine, their parents obsessively overprotective – and on the anniversary of her death, Lucy engages in a familiar ritual to pay tribute to her in the place where she was killed. But this year, Lucy encounters a strange machine that zaps her back to the week before her sister’s death and she must try to find a way to change history.

There’s little of interest to come from that set-up, which is almost identical to that of last Halloween’s Totally Killer which saw Kiernan Shipka play a high schooler who travels back to the 80s before her mother gets killed by a madman (that film was also incredibly similar to 2015’s The Final Girls, in which Taissa Farmiga’s high schooler gets zapped into an 80s slasher movie starring her since deceased mother). The most interesting idea is one that’s a little too dark for the film to wrestle with for all that long: that if Lucy saves her sister, it would mean she wouldn’t exist, given how her parents only had her as a sort of replacement. But dark ideas of self-preservation are sidestepped for ineffective sentimentality.

That’s less of a problem in a slasher but the lack of tension, innovative kills or atmosphere is far more of an issue, the film looking every bit as tinny and flat as the very worst that streaming has to offer. The writer-director Hannah MacPherson, working from a story by Freaky’s Michael Kennedy, relies heavily on nostalgia, aimed at those who grew up with the previous slasher film cycle, kickstarted by Scream. But there’s only so much that velour tracksuits and Vanessa Carlton can do and it’s only in one briefly poignant scene, in which the sisters discuss the evolution of queer acceptance, that MacPherson and Kennedy find something vaguely original in their deeply unoriginal Back to the Future set-up (credit to Netflix’s in-house stars Bailey and Gentry who are both charming in underwritten roles).

Like the dreadful second Happy Death Day film, there’s far too much focus on the particulars of time travel, as if we expect or want a film like this to be rooted in any actual science, and like the many high-concept horrors that we’ve seen of late, there’s a laziness to how it handles the simple slasher beats. The gimmick is once again used as distraction from what’s otherwise a pretty hopeless regurgitation and at this stage in the cycle, we can see right through it.

• Time Cut is now available on Netflix