What happens if you mix horror with time travel? Well, you get Time Cut, a time traveling horror movie I watched recently. This is a review of the movie, with minor spoilers.
In Time Cut, high school student Lucy is a "replacement" daughter. She was born after her older sister, Summer, died at the blade of a local serial killer. Her life is defined either by how much she reminds the locals of Summer, or else by memorials in honour of Summer. In her spare time, she's an inventor, and hopes to get an internship, and eventually a job, at NASA.
During an annual visit to the site (a barn, of course) of Summer's gruesome murder, Lucy wanders off and discovers a time machine tucked way inside one of the unused barns. It activates and Lucy finds herself back in 2003, the year of Summer's murder.
Lucy does the only sensible thing: Return to high school, meet Summer for herself, make new friends, and try to figure out how to get home. As she does this, however, she accidentally befriends Summer, and slowly realises that this is her chance to save Summer. But were she to do that, would Lucy even exist in her own time? And also, how are all the inevitable romances developing between high school students going to get sorted out?
The time travel in this movie is kept pretty simple. Time doesn't get reset over and over, we don't get a bunch of different versions of Lucy running around trying to prevent a murder and then trying to prevent herself from preventing the murder, and so on. Time travel happens basically once (technically more than that, but it's at the end and only happens to resolve plot threads), and that's the setup. Lucy goes back in time, and has to figure out what to do there and how to get back to her own life (and other minor problems, like whether she exists.)
She enlists the help of Summer and her high school friends Quinn and Emmy. This complicates matters because relationships start to develop, and of course Lucy gets tangled up in it all. This is the least interesting part of the story, for me. It feels like rudimentary Back to the Future or even The City on the Edge of Forever stuff. I've seen it all before, this doesn't add much for me. Then again, people who haven't seen classic sci fi (where "classic" is anything older than, say, 20 years) might find this plot element satisfying, so I can appreciate why it's here, and it doesn't take anything away from the plot. It's just not the part of the story that connects with me.
Strangely, the time travel doesn't really connect with me either. I've seen so much time travel fiction that it's transcended its own cliché for me. I'm so thoroughly impressed by time travel that I'm also not impressed by time travel. You could tell me anything and as long as you wrap it in a time travel paradox, I'll believe it. I can't be bothered to graph out the timelines, cross reference them with parallel universes, divide it by the multiverse to a factor of n, or annotate it with words like prime or alpha and beta. I just take it on faith now. Time travel exists in fiction, and it can account for literally anything. You want to generate a problem? Use time travel. You want to generate a solution? Cite time travel.
What I enjoyed most about this film is the idea of time travel and horror. I'm sure it's been done before. I've probably seen the movies that do it. But this was unique and simplistic enough that I found it interesting and fun. What would you do if you could maybe prevent the death of a sibling you never knew? And would you do that if it meant you'd likely no longer exist, or at best you'd exist but differently, as a result? It's not something any of us are likely to face, but that's the kind of thought exercise we geeks often enjoy the most. It's theoretical not only because it's not happening now, it's so theoretical that it likely can never happen (or, as they say, it would have already happened by now.)
There's more time travel than horror in Time Cut, and arguably not enough to appeal to exclusive fans of time travel or exclusive fans of horror. I fear it carves out a very niche audience for itself. You have to be a fan of time travel AND horror, in exactly the ratio presented in this movie. I can imagine it's a tough sell. But I happen to be a fan of time travel and horror, and the ratio in this movie is one of many ratios that works for me, so I enjoyed this movie.
It's probably a pretty good intro slasher movie, too. If you're curious about the "slasher" sub-genre of horror, but you're not sure you can take too much slashing, then this could be a friendly entry point. The slasher-style killer is here, mostly as an homage to classic slasher killers, but the killer is only a problem at the start and ending of the movie. The rest is time travel and high school drama.
I enjoyed Time Cut and would watch it again with friends, especially friends new to horror films.
Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash