‘Time Cut’ movie review: An enjoyable ride through an implausible wormhole

Time Cut: A lighthearted teen time-travel slasher film with a twist, streaming on Netflix now.

‘What if’ is the starting point of all thought, the bridge that leads from the physical to metaphysical plane. Just as I am getting my mind bent in all sorts of exciting ways by Blake Crouch’s anxious 2019 novel, Recursion, comes Time Cut, a teen, time-travel slasher film, which serves as a happy amuse-bouche to Helena and Barry’s race to make sense of the False Memory Syndrome in Recursion.

The fun thing about Time Cut is it does not take itself too seriously like some other weighty incursions into the fabric of the space-time continuum. In April 2003, in the small town of Sweetly, a killer murders four teenagers including Summer (Antonia Gentry) and her best friend Emmy (Megan Best).

The killer is never caught and Sweetly does not recover from the horrific slayings. In 2024, Lucy (Madison Bailey) a gifted teenager, has just been accepted for an internship programme at NASA. We learn that Lucy is Summer’s sister and after much mental maths, figure out she was born after Summer’s death. Lucy’s parents, Gil (Michael Shanks) and Kendra (Rachael Crawford) are shadows of themselves, preserving Summer’s room as a shrine to her memory.

On Summer’s death anniversary, Lucy stumbles upon a time machine and is accidentally transported to 2003. Lucy realises she has the chance to stop the Sweetly slasher, and save her sister and the town, which will unfortunately erase her (Lucy’s) existence.

There are the usual fish-out-of-water comments (what is Twitter? Why is the modem screeching at me?) and the all-knowing future wisdom (do not invest in BlackBerry). Lucy meets and gets to know Summer with a makeover and mall visit thrown in.

Quinn (Griffin Gluck) is the physics nerd who helps Lucy rebuild the time machine, which like all good time machines in popular culture has a missing part. He tells Lucy, “this is not a Marty McFly situation” referencing the greatest teen time travel trilogy, Back to the Future.

There is a bubblegum brightness to Time Cut, which even while featuring a nasty killer, manages to be upbeat and has an optimistic ending. Time Cut is the kind of movie that will slip by smoothly in your peripheral vision while you ponder the secrets of the infinite probability drive or your costume for a Diwaloween party.