By the end of this review for Hannah Macpherson’s Time Cut, I may give it some credit, but let’s just say that it deserves every mean thing I say about this time travel slasher. Before I write some bad or good notes, here’s some plot, because why not, am I right. In 2003, the small town of Sweetly mourns the murder of four teens thanks to a serial killer. Killers, as they often do, break up families like Lucy’s (Madison Bailey). She’s understandably sad about the murders just like her father (Michael Shanks) is.

Lucy and her family visit the barn where the killer murders her later sister Summer (Antonia Gentry). There she finds a time travel machine taking her from 2024 to 2003, days before the first murder happens. She doesn’t save the victims of the first murder but she may with the second victim, Summer’s (girl)friend Emmy (Megan Best). Time Cut makes those days idyllic, as Tina gets to see a happy version of her family. But she has to care for herself first and go back to 2024, needing someone to help her out. That help comes from Quinn (Griffin Gluck), a fellow nerd who tinkers with the time machine. 

Lucy and Quinn say a lot of science-y jargon, a thing that normally happens in sci-fi, because working on the machine, to them, seems better than trying to save teens from a serial killer. That detective work, then, seems to fall on Summer, without knowing she’ll become one of the victims. Time Cut‘s version of detective work is just Summer breaking into people’s lockers and comparing notes. It’s as if the movie doesn’t want to give her the pieces to solve this ‘preventable’ crime.

The nerds are of two minds when it comes to Lucy revealing everything she knows as Quinn, at first, doesn’t want to know anything but that changes when he finds out Summer’s fate. Lucy wants to tell Summer the latter’s fate until she realises that if Summer lives, she never exists. Time Cut shows Lucy eventually telling Summer who is surprisingly cool about the ramifications of changing timelines. The movie chooses which sister is the selfish one but sadly doesn’t do anything else with those traits.

The three main teens try to survive a town with a killer on the loose, which means Time Cut is also over and it’s time for the movie to reveal who that killer is. There’s a version of this movie where that attempted murder scenes and the killer reveal are interesting. Without spoiling anything, a better version of the movie would do a hall of mirrors effect. Doing so may have scratched the surface of these characters in an otherwise shallow movie.