The new science fiction mystery slasher film on Netflix, Time Cut, has just about the right dose of early 2000s nostalgia to make it a fun enough watch, even though it is lacking in most other respects. The film is centered around Lucy Field, a teenager who struggles to live in the shadow of a ghastly incident that took place twenty-one years ago, when her elder sister, Summer, was killed by a spooky serial killer in the small town of Sweetly. Although Time Cut is quite predictable and shallow by the end, it is meant to be watched only for casual mindless entertainment and is rather adequate in that regard.
Spoiler Alert
What is the Netflix film about?
Time Cut begins on the 18th of April, 2003, with a teenager named Summer Field walking into a barn in her small hometown of Sweetly to attend a high school party that has been arranged for a very peculiar reason. The town of Sweetly has been dealing with an unprecedented danger over the last few days, for there is a serial killer on the loose who has already taken the lives of three victims. Three teenagers, Brian, Val, and Emmy, have been killed over a span of two days, spreading an air of terror over the town, with an official curfew being imposed after dark. It is both to challenge this curfew and question the authorities, as well as to honor their friends, that the party is being held at the Hayshed Barn. It is also customary for the high schoolers to hold a party, named Spring Fling, at this particular time of the year, and no kind of tragedy or threat to their lives can deter them from doing so.
Although Summer is still grieving the loss of her best friend, Emmy, she attends the party only for the sake of her friends from school, not paying heed to the risk that it involves, just like everyone else at the party. After being greeted by a friend named Quinn, she is swooped away by the most popular boy in school and also Summer’s ex-boyfriend, Ethan. However, nobody at the party notices that the masked serial killer has also made it to the barn, and he eventually makes Summer his target when the girl leaves the party to avoid Ethan’s romantic advances. As soon as she realizes the danger she is in, Summer tries her best to run and hide, even taking shelter in the out-of-use shed nearby, but the murderer ultimately catches her. As fate would have it, Summer is mercilessly slaughtered by the serial killer, soon to be named the Sweetly Slasher.
Twenty-one years later, a teenager named Lucy is seen in her bedroom, and it is instantly made clear that she is actually the younger sister of Summer. Even so many years after the incident, the unfortunate death of Summer is mourned by the Field family, and her parents have not been able to move on from her death at all. As a result, Lucy hardly ever gets any attention from her parents, and her family still does not celebrate any moments of joy or togetherness, still mourning the loss of Summer. To make matters worse, Lucy has to give up on a brilliant opportunity to work as an intern at NASA, only because her overprotective parents do not want her to travel to Washington DC, all by herself. As Lucy finds it extremely difficult to accept her life’s conditions, she extraordinarily comes across a time machine inside the shed at the now abandoned Hayshed Barn and is immediately transferred back in time to 2003.
Did Lucy stop the emergence of the Sweetly Slasher?
As soon as Lucy steps out of the shed after being hit by the sharp laser ray of the time machine, she notices the world around her to be very different than usual. The Hayshed Barn is no longer an old abandoned compound, and shops that had gone out of business in her world are open and operational now. She then quickly realizes that she has traveled back in time, to 2003, and the date is the 16th of April, which is exactly two days before Summer was killed. Interestingly, this is the very same day on which the Sweetly Slasher serial killer first sprung to action, and so Lucy’s first and only plan is to stop the perpetrator from committing any crimes. Although 21 years had passed, the police had not been able to solve the cases of the teenagers’ murders, and so the identity of the killer is still a mystery to Lucy.
This makes her task even more difficult, for she has to figure out who the killer is before he can begin his gruesome killing streak, along with saving the victims without directly telling them who she is. But Lucy does not actually mind telling people that she is from the future, and so when a science nerd like herself becomes friends with her, she tells him about her real identity. This boy is Quinn, who was earlier seen speaking to Summer at the party, and she actually saves him from a bunch of bullies, led by Ethan, who were trying to throw him into the nearby river. Although Quinn initially doubts Lucy’s claim of being from the future, she is able to convince him by showing him her smartphone, which is definitely a proof of futuristic tech for Quinn in 2003. However, she does not tell him about the serial killer yet and sets out to stop the murderer by herself.
Lucy knows that the first murders of Brian and Val had taken place at the local shopping mall, and so she heads to the place only some time before the gruesome crime is about to take place. By the time she finds the exact shop, Brian has already been killed by the masked murderer, but she is able to distract the man to save Val, at least temporarily. Since Val is shocked by these sudden occurrences of first seeing her boyfriend killed in a horrific manner and then having a masked psychopath chase her around, she fails to keep up with Lucy and is ultimately killed. Incidentally, a security guard at the mall is also killed by the masked murderer this time around, which had not happened in the original timeline. Although Lucy is upset by this change of events, Quinn warns her that this is a perfect example of why one should not play around with one’s past, despite knowing the future, since it can very easily lead to different branches of reality.
Who had sent Summer the threatening letter?
In her original timeline, in 2024, Lucy had ventured into the room of her elder sister, which was still maintained by her parents just the way it used to be when Summer used to live in it. Lucy had actually never known her elder sister or even met her, for she was conceived by their parents after Summer’s death. Later on in Time Cut, she actually gets to know what she had always suspected—her parents had conceived Lucy only as an attempt to get over their grief of having lost Summer, but it had been a failed attempt in a lot of ways. The parents are emotionally absent from Lucy’s life, and their inability to accept and move on from the death of their first child directly affects the way in which their second child has to grow up. Simply in an effort to know her sister better, from any source other than the countless newspaper articles written about her and the other victims, Lucy entered Summer’s room and ended up finding something quite mysterious.
Hidden underneath the wooden panels of the floor was a folded piece of paper, on which a handwritten note had been left for Summer. The short note, directly addressed to Summer, stated that the girl will never be free from possibly some burden or guilt, and also threateningly mentioned that she will regret whatever she had done to deserve such a note. The note, or letter, had been signed with only one letter, E, and it meant that someone with a name beginning with an E had sent Summer the note. At the time, Lucy believed that the sender must have been Ethan, whom Summer had dumped only a few days before her death. In fact, Ethan was also the prime suspect in the case according to the police, as they believed that he must have been the Sweetly Slasher, but the young man had solid alibis during each of the murders, and so he could never be charged.
However, as Lucy goes back to the past, meets her sister, and eventually becomes friends with her, after telling her who she really is, she realizes that she had completely misunderstood the note. In reality, it had been sent to Summer by her best friend, Emmy, who was actually not just her best friend but also her lover. Summer and Emmy had realized that they had genuine feelings for each other, and they dreamed of being a couple, but sadly, society back in 2003 did not make it easy for young girls to express their queer sexual orientations so easily. Despite the social stigma that they would have to face, the girls had decided to come out to their respective parents, and while Emmy had actually done so, Summer could never muster up the courage to tell her parents. This was an ultimate betrayal for Emmy, and she had written the note to Summer for this, reminding her how she will have to live her entire life with this grave secret and how she will obviously regret this decision of hers. Lucy’s intervention actually helps save this romance, as she first manages to inform Quinn and Summer about Emmy being the next target of the serial killer, and they all go to save her. Unlike the previous night, Lucy and her new friends are actually able to save Emmy, and later on in the film, Summer and Emmy kiss in front of everyone as well, confirming their romance to everyone present at the scene.
How does the time machine actually work?
At times, the plot of Time Cut becomes as confused as its teenage protagonist, Lucy, and so it shifts its focus to the inexplicable time machine. Amidst her attempts to undo the serial killer’s actions, Lucy decides that she should head home to her original timeline in order to stop creating any more messes in 2003. But in order to do so, she must first figure out the mystery of the time machine itself, and she gets Quinn’s help in this regard as well. Together, they figure out that two separate elements, temporarily codenamed Particle A and Particle B, need to be brought into contact in order to cause a temporal shift, which essentially changes the time around the machine to the desired time selected on its console, hurtling the user forwards or backwards in time.
Particle A is actually a laser beam, while Particle B is rubidium, or antimatter. While the first object is readily available to the teenagers, since it is fixed to the time machine itself, they have to get hold of the antimatter to make the time machine work again. Lucy also finds out that the machine had actually been developed by SONR, a local scientific experiment and research facility in Sweetly. Therefore, the canister with antimatter inside it is also to be found at the research facility, and for this Lucy sneaks into the place. However, she finds that one of the canisters is also missing, meaning that the serial killer is actually from the future as well.
Who is the real Sweetly Slasher?
At the same time when Lucy sneaks into the SONR facility, Summer and Quinn attend the Spring Fling party, very aware and prepared to face off against the serial killer who will appear soon. Eventually, the killer does show up, and just as he is about to attack the teenagers, Lucy reaches the place and drives her car into the perpetrator. Shortly after this, it is revealed that the Sweetly Slasher is actually Quinn from the future, who had used the same time travel machine to take revenge on the people who had messed up his teenage years and, in turn, had ruined his whole life. In the original timeline, where there was no Lucy to intervene, the bullies led by Ethan had actually thrown Quinn into the river, causing him tremendous embarrassment in front of everyone.
While the insults of the others did not affect him as much, Quinn clearly remembered how Summer, the girl whom he genuinely had feelings for, had laughed at him. Later on, Quinn even wrote Summer a letter expressing his immense love for her, and in the altered timeline, Lucy actually sees this letter at the boy’s garage. As Summer had realized her sexual orientation by then, she obviously rejected his advances and wanted to be just friends with him. But she had not come out publicly, and so Quinn ended up believing that she rejected him because she did not consider him good enough. Along with these troubles, Quinn also had to go through problems at home since his father had abandoned the family, which affected his mother so much that she stopped caring about their son either. As a result, Quinn was left all alone in the world, and the traumatic experiences in his teenage years led to him becoming a criminal-minded person in his adult life.
Before Lucy found the time travel machine back in 2024, she had actually seen a strange flash of light from the shed near the abandoned barn, and it had been caused by adult Quinn using the machine to return to 2003. It was he who then donned a mask and went around killing everyone close to Summer before killing the girl as well. But Quinn always planned to return to his original timeline so that he would not get caught or punished for the crimes, and this was why he had already stolen a canister of antimatter from the SONR facility. In the original timeline, he had successfully managed to use the time machine once again and return to 2024, and this was why the police could never solve the mystery of the serial killings.
What happens to Lucy and Summer in the end?
Ultimately, Lucy’s presence alters a lot of events, as she manages to switch on the time machine to take herself and future Quinn back to 2024, where she eventually kills him. The girl then returns home only to realize that her parents have no clue about who she is. This is because Lucy had successfully prevented the death of Summer in this timeline, which meant that her parents never considered conceiving a second child, and so there was technically no reason for Lucy to exist. Thus, at the end of Time Cut, Lucy actually decides to travel back in time to 2003, using the canister that future Quinn had stolen from the facility. She settles down with her elder sister and their parents, who are surely happy to welcome her into the family after learning that she had saved Summer’s life. Thus, the Field family becomes a whole and happy unit after merging the results of the two separate timelines, and Lucy continues to pursue her ambitions in this new life of hers. She even applies for the NASA internship, gets into the program as well, and will get to attend it. Since Quinn did not have to face any humiliations or heartbreaks in this altered timeline, there is no reason for him to turn evil either, and so he remains close friends with the Field sisters.
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