The triumphant return of the slasher film, a subgenre that had been principally useless and buried for much too lengthy, arrived with key caveats. Those who had been now being made had been both a part of a legacy franchise (updates to Scream or Halloween or subsequent 12 months’s I Know What You Did Final Summer season) or had been hinged on a goofy gimmick. We had time loops (the Glad Dying Day sequence), time journey (Completely Killer), timeline leaping (the wonderful Concern Road trilogy), alternate realities (It’s a Great Knife) or physique swapping (the underrated Freaky), brash genre-bending variations that every one appeared a bit reticent to rely solely on the bottom pleasures of the system.
What had appeared ingenious on the outset has began to change into predictably repetitive, as evidenced by Netflix’s ho-hum teen providing Time Reduce, a movie that just about feels just like the Scary Film parody of this latest development. To be truthful to these behind it, it was filmed again in 2021 (it has that acquainted, 10-person crowd Covid film vibe) however even when its conceit had been more energizing, there’s not sufficient else right here to benefit that prized Halloween viewing slot. Hold scrolling.
In a 2003-set chilly open that tells us every little thing we have to learn about what’s to come back – unhealthy lighting, zero suspense, nostalgic needle-drop – we see the excessive schooler Summer season (Ginny & Georgia’s Antonia Gentry) get murdered by a masked killer, the newest in what we’re instructed is a spree concentrating on her buddies. We leap ahead to 2024 and her sister Lucy (Outer Banks’s Madison Bailey) continues to be coping with the loss. They by no means met, she was born simply two years after, however the home continues to be haunted – her room an untouched shrine, their dad and mom obsessively overprotective – and on the anniversary of her loss of life, Lucy engages in a well-recognized ritual to pay tribute to her within the place the place she was killed. However this 12 months, Lucy encounters a wierd machine that zaps her again to the week earlier than her sister’s loss of life and he or she should attempt to discover a strategy to change historical past.
There’s little of curiosity to come back from that set-up, which is nearly equivalent to that of final Halloween’s Completely Killer which noticed Kiernan Shipka play a excessive schooler who travels again to the 80s earlier than her mom will get killed by a madman (that movie was additionally extremely just like 2015’s The Last Ladies, wherein Taissa Farmiga’s excessive schooler will get zapped into an 80s slasher film starring her since deceased mom). Probably the most fascinating thought is one which’s a bit too darkish for the movie to wrestle with for all that lengthy: that if Lucy saves her sister, it might imply she wouldn’t exist, given how her dad and mom solely had her as a form of alternative. However darkish concepts of self-preservation are sidestepped for ineffective sentimentality.
That’s much less of an issue in a slasher however the lack of pressure, revolutionary kills or environment is much extra of a difficulty, the movie trying each bit as tinny and flat because the very worst that streaming has to supply. The author-director Hannah MacPherson, working from a narrative by Freaky’s Michael Kennedy, depends closely on nostalgia, aimed toward those that grew up with the earlier slasher movie cycle, kickstarted by Scream. However there’s solely a lot that velour tracksuits and Vanessa Carlton can do and it’s solely in a single briefly poignant scene, wherein the sisters talk about the evolution of queer acceptance, that MacPherson and Kennedy discover one thing vaguely authentic of their deeply unoriginal Again to the Future set-up (credit score to Netflix’s in-house stars Bailey and Gentry who’re each charming in underwritten roles).
Just like the dreadful second Glad Dying Day movie, there’s far an excessive amount of give attention to the particulars of time journey, as if we anticipate or desire a movie like this to be rooted in any precise science, and like the numerous high-concept horrors that we’ve seen of late, there’s a laziness to the way it handles the easy slasher beats. The gimmick is as soon as once more used as distraction from what’s in any other case a reasonably hopeless regurgitation and at this stage within the cycle, we are able to see proper by way of it.
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