Time Cut (2024)

Time Cut arrives as a Netflix slasher in which a teenager named Lucy is flung from 2024 back to 2003, two days before a masked killer murders her older sister. The premise has been worked before, and critics were unkind, comparing it unfavorably to its own recent ancestor. The film does not argue with them. It is content to be light, quick, and faintly absurd, and it largely succeeds at being those things.

Where the film carries measurable social content is in its treatment of Summer, the sister, who is a lesbian. Lucy discovers the truth, encourages her to come out, and Summer later declares her love for Emmy in front of an assembled school. The beat is warm and it anchors the third act, though it arrives through plot and character instead of sustained sermonizing. The film is also directed by a woman, places two young women of color at its center, and builds its emotional engine on sisterhood and a girl racing to save a sibling. None of this is framed as a corrective. The casting is simply casting. The sisterhood is simply the plot.

What the film declines to do is lecture. There is no racial commentary, no economic critique of the decaying small town, no climate anxiety, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergent diagnosis. The 2003 setting is a genre device, not a historical argument. The result is a modest vintage: a few genuine notes of social awareness, a Hilary Duff needle drop, and a hay barn full of lasers. We have tasted worse. We have also tasted better, and we will taste both again.