Spoiler Warning: There are a ton of spoilers about the Time Cut ending below. If you’ve yet to watch the 2024 Netflix movie, feel free to cut out before anything is spoiled!
Every now and then a movie comes along with a pretty straight-forward premise, only for things to get all complicated by the time the end credits roll. That’s the case with Time Cut, Hannah Macpherson’s slasher that arrived on the 2024 movie schedule in late October 2024 and immediately became a hit with people with a Netflix subscription.
The movie follows teenager Lucy Field (Madison Bailey) as she stumbles upon a time machine in 2024 and travels back to 2003 when she's able to attempt to prevent her sister, Summer (Antonia Gentry) from being viciously murdered by a masked killer. And while it appears to have a relatively east-to-follow story on the surface, it quickly becomes a complicated exploration of place, time, and where we fit into it. So much so, that you might need some explanation to make sense of it all.
That said, let’s break down the Time Cut ending, the various time paradoxes in this surprisingly great horror movie, how things wrap up for all the major players, and what Macpherson also had planned for its big finale. But before we begin, remember there are some major spoilers ahead.
Two Quinns At One Time
In the final few minutes of Time Cut, it is revealed that the Sweetly Slasher, the serial killer that butchered four high schoolers in April 2003 was none other than Quinn (Griffin Gluck), but not the nice and kindhearted version of the character that helps Lucy uncover the mystery of her sister’s murder and prevent it from happening. Instead, it is a future version of the character from an alternate timeline still upset with Summer for rejecting him, and being subjected to bullying from his classmates years earlier.
How do we end up with two Quinns? Well, earlier in the movie, Lucy saves the still-friendly Quinn from being thrown into a river by a group of bullies, which essentially creates a path for the character where he likely won't go on to become an obsessed and vicious killer. However, this doesn’t mean the deranged Quinn who’s already planning his attack is zapped out of existence.
Similar to how time travel works in Avengers: Endgame, Time Cut has different timelines that branch off if something is changed, which in this case would be the bullying incident that Lucy disrupts. But as far as we know, if someone leaves their timeline (using a time machine), they maintain their existence even if their past is changed. This would explain why evil Quinn tells his younger version that killing himself wouldn’t stop the murderer version of him from existing. So this is pretty much the opposite of how things work in Back to the Future.
Lucy Still Exists After Saving Her Sister
Just before evil Quinn can carry out his plan and kill Summer, Lucy attacks him and the two are thrown through a time-warp into 2024, her original timeline. Appearing in a parking garage, the two continue their fight until Lucy electrocutes and then stabs Quinn in the chest with his own knife, ending his life and reign of terror in the process. Summer and good Quinn, having come to terms with the fact they’ll never see Lucy again after she jumped 21 years into the future, are shocked to see their sister and friend, respectively, pretty much appear out of nowhere and say that she’s going to stay in their time.
Not to keep comparing Time Cut to the Avengers: Endgame ending, but Lucy pretty much pulls a Captain America in that she decides to go back to a timeline where she’s going to be happiest. Here, she’ll be able to have a life in which she has a sister and not just a “looming presence” she could never live up to, and parents who aren’t the grief-stricken zombies she knew back in her original reality. However, this does bring up a ton of questions about Lucy’s original timeline and if a version of her still exists within it.
Does This Mean Lucy No Longer Exists In 2024?
Near the end of Time Cut, Quinn and Summer ask Lucy why she came back to 2003 and did not stay in her original timeline, and her response leaves us with more questions than answers if we’re being honest. While she does admit that she tried to go back to her original reality to see if anything was different, Lucy reveals that her parents didn’t recognize her.
As Summer wasn't killed, her parents didn't go on to conceive another child in an attempt to move on after Summer's death. The fact that Lucy's parents didn't recognize her seems to confirm that they didn't have another daughter. Or if they did go on to have a second child, that child wasn't Lucy. So presumably there is no Lucy in 2024, however it also leaves us to wonder, if Lucy had not prevented Summer's death, does it mean that she would have found another version of herself existing in 2024? Or would she simply have slipped back into her old timeline with some changes due to her time traveling activities?
Regardless, as it stands at the end of the movie, Lucy is a girl out of time with no better place to be than 2003, where she can live out her life with Summer and Quinn, as well as the knowledge of everything that has happened over the past 21 years.
How Time Cut Could Have Ended
As has been the case for countless movie endings over the years, Time Cut could have wrapped up in a way that would have had a more happy-go-lucky feeling but thumbed its nose at time-travel logic. When discussing the Time Cut ending with Netflix Tudum following its release, director Hannah Macpherson shared one idea she thought of in the process:
We had a variety of different options for endings, including both sisters being alive in the present day. Summer would have been 20 years older than Lucy, but they were still both alive. We just felt that that image of 45-year-old Summer and teenage Lucy wasn’t as happy as the two girls as teenagers getting to experience life together. It just felt so good, time-travel logic be damned.
While this would have been a fun way to wrap up the movie, it doesn’t really make sense considering Lucy’s parents didn’t make the decision to have another baby until well after Summer died. Unless, Summer, who was a teenager at the time, convinced her parents they should try for number two, and even then, she and her sister would've had such a big age gap that they wouldn't have had the same relationship they were having together in 2003.
Overall, the Time Cut ending does do a good job of wrapping things up, even if things do get so complicated the more you think about it. And while it’s far from being one of the best movies on Netflix, this sci-fi-infused slasher film is a great addition to the list of great time travel movies.
