2024, directed by Hannah MacPherson
This is going to be a wild tonal shift in the middle of a bunch of posts about horror movies, probably, because I have a Rotten Tomatoes list of the best horror films directed by women that I want to see more of, whereas Time Cut is a cute teen movie about a science nerd who’s about to graduate high school who’s accidentally sent back in time to a few days before her older sister was murdered by a serial killer. And it’s honestly really funny and entertaining! The end leaves open a lot of logistical questions but it’s not really in a frustrating way because the movie doesn’t take itself all that seriously to begin with – it doesn’t even attempt to explain the science aside from some vague references to lasers touching and being fueled by antimatter. Lucy’s reactions to 2003 fashion (a time period that’s very familiar to me, having graduated high school not long before that) are absolutely sublime as she walks around the school hallways in a very sedate t shirt and jeans checking out the bright colours, mini skirts, boob tubes, glittery embellishments (remember body glitter? I do), and floppy haired boys. At one point she attempts to prove to someone she’s really from the future by showing him her phone, and when he asks incredulously, “You call people on this?” she tries to clarify, “Well I don’t… call people….” before listing off all the other things she does do instead. The one function of a phone that would have been recognised in the 90s1 and it’s literally the one thing using a phone that most people who actually grew up in or after the 90s just hate doing.
I will put a disclaimer here that my judgement of media is not necessarily about whether something is good, especially only shortly after I’ve consumed it because it usually takes me a while to mull it over, but more about whether it entertained me. Time Cut is getting about a 4/10 (or 2/5 or 40%) on review aggregators and the like. It’s not a brilliant story that you’ll be left thinking about for weeks or months – I can even give you a much better movie about the highly specific genre in which a teenage girl goes back in time and tries to prevent her older sibling’s death, 2022’s See You Yesterday. But I had fun, and sometimes that’s all you need.
- I say 90s mostly because I had a cellphone before 2003 that was capable of texting, though it only stored 10 text messages on the device both incoming or outgoing and if I forgot to delete them the new ones couldn’t come in. I swear I’m not ignoring you, I’m just bad at keeping on top of my text-box! ↩︎