Time Cut Ending Explained By Stars: Who Is The Sweetly Slasher?
“Time Cut,” a new Netflix horror movie, is like “Back to the Future” meets “Friday the 13th.”
“When I read Michael Kennedy’s fantastic script, this idea of time travel with your standard teenage slasher film, I was hooked,” director Hannah Macpherson tells TODAY.com.
Lucy (Madison Bailey) is a smart high schooler with a promising future. But her parents, scarred by her sister’s unsolved murder 20 years ago, discourage her from taking an internship at NASA.
Then, Lucy has a chance to change her family’s past and her own present when she stumbles upon a time machine that transports her back to April 16, 2003.
She arrives just few days before her sister, Summer (Antonia Gentry), was killed in a three-day unsolved spree killing of four high schoolers by The Sweetly Slasher — the nickname for the town's killer.
By time traveling, she’s able to meet her sister for the first time. Macpherson says Summer and Lucy's growing bond made it “impossible” for her to say no to the project.
“They have insane chemistry," Macpherson says of leads Gentry and Bailey. "They enjoy each other, they make each other laugh. I could see them taking care of each other on set. It was one of those moments where you go, ‘Oh, this is really magical.’”
Find out what happens to Lucy and Summer, and the identity of her killer, below.
What happens in ‘Time Cut’?At first, Lucy is reluctant at first to change the outcome of the murders, worrying she will mess with the future.
But, over the course of the film, Lucy befriends her sister Summer and Quinn (Griffin Gluck), a fellow nerd who is always picked on.
After some internal turmoil, the three attempt to save the students who were killed — with some successes.
"I think it's really nice to see that even though they are meeting for the first time, there is that sort of innate sisterhood that they have," Antonia Gentry, who plays Summer, tells TODAY.com. "I think also they're both very strong willed and independent in coming together to prevent this horrible thing from happening."
In order to get herself back to the future, Lucy must break into a local nuclear research facility to steal their antimatter, a crucial element in the time travel machine.
When she gets there, she finds out the murderer has already been there to steal the same thing. Turns out he’s also from the future and the time machine she accidentally used was his.
Then comes the reveal: The serial killer is Quinn from the future, traveling back in time to avenge his younger self and kill Summer and all her friends because she rejected him.
Following the revelation, the trio confronts Future Quinn. Past Quinn tries to take his own life so his future self will also die. But Future Quinn says that’s not how it works.
So, Lucy tackles Future Quinn to the ground in the time machine, catapulting them both back to 2024.
Now in 2024, Lucy kills Future Quinn (don’t worry, Past Quinn is fine).
Next, she stops by her parents’ house to make sure nothing monumental has changed. Since Summer, in this reality, lived, Lucy’s parents don’t know who she is. But Lucy’s OK with it: She decides to time travel one last time back to 2003 so she can grow up with Summer and Quinn.
“I think they would be like the three closest friends that anyone could have,” Madison Bailey, who plays Lucy, tells TODAY.com.
“I think that would be a case of, ‘We’ve all been through something and seen something that no one will even believe.’ You’re bonded for life at that point, when you have a shared experience with someone, you just you keep that, and nobody can take that from you.”
Gentry and Gluck in 'Time Cut."Netflix via YouTubeWhy Lucy goes back to 2003 at the end — and other versions of the ending filmmakers consideredMacpherson tells TODAY.com that the movie's creators mulled over multiple endings before settling on Lucy returning to 2003 to be with Summer and Quinn.
“There was a version that we all liked where everyone sort of ended up alive in the present day, which meant Summer was 43 and Lucy was 17, and it was essentially like she had lived and the parents still had a child,” she says.
Gentry says there was a version of the ending they filmed where Summer ended up living and killing Future Quinn herself years down the line as an adult.
But Macpherson says it felt more “satisfying” to think of the sisters going through life the same age.
“I think it’s right where she belongs,” Macpherson says.
Bailey thinks the writers landed on the best outcome for her character.
“I think her decision to come back to 2003 is the best,” Bailey says. “Her life really never made sense in 2024. Knowing what she’s missing (in a sister) now is really different from not knowing. I think going back to 2003 is definitely the best decision for Lucy.”
Bailey also addresses a major change for Lucy — she's on her own now. “She doesn’t have parents anymore,” Bailey says. “They don’t know who she is, but also, in Lucy’s world, they never really understood her.”
In getting to know Summer, Lucy also comes to understand her parents.
“Lucy’s learning perspective. She spent so long building up this animosity and blame, and I think she’s just now starting to process. She’s understanding her parents for the first time, and imagining that loss and kind of putting the pieces together for what they’ve been through,” Bailey says.
Bailey says “everyone’s happier in this scenario,” Lucy’s parents included.
She hopes that following the credits, Summer’s parents just adopt Lucy.
“We can hope that she’s like, ‘So I don’t have anywhere to go,’ and that these people are just so lovely that they take her in and keep her forever and ever,” she says.
How time travel affected the movie’s outcomeMacpherson says that the fun of time travel is that there’s no set of rules you have to stick with. You can “end up down a very deep rabbit hole trying to investigate time travel," she says.
“I spent so many days with a whiteboard that looked like a murder board with lines of, you know, Quinn Number Three and Lucy Number Seven,” she jokes.
But in the end, Macpherson decided less information was better — especially since "this movie is about nostalgia" more than the mechanics of time travel.
Macpherson says that “Time Cut” is actually set in a “multiverse.”
“We don’t outright say that, but I think it’s fun that people who have seen it are excited by that realization,” she says. “To me, that is thematically important, because the idea is that every choice we make every day creates a new version of ourselves. And this movie is about us controlling who we are in the future.”
It's not only the script that takes the viewer back in time. The actors got to time travel, too.
Gentry jokes that the 2000s was a “very impractical era,” reminiscing about how much time it took her to unhook her costume's many belts.
“I was just like thinking about how impractical almost everything that I was wearing was,” she jokes.
Georgina DiNardo
Georgina is an editorial intern for TODAY.com, based in New York City.
