Even the stars of Time Cut were surprised to learn the identity of the film’s masked killer. “I like to predict who the killer is, what’s going to happen, what’s the next jump scare,” Antonia Gentry (Ginny & Georgia), who plays high school student and murder victim Summer, tells Tudum. “I was surprised!” 

Her co-star and on-screen younger sister agrees. “I was shocked,” Madison Bailey (Outer Banks) tells Tudum. “But it also made a lot of sense to me.” 

Allen Fraser

But the stars also had a few questions — the time-travel/slasher movie has its share of timestream paradoxes. “I don’t know anything about time-travel, so I was just hung up on the details of how that would work,” Gentry says. 

The filmmakers were way ahead of them. “I really did stand in front of a whiteboard with arrows,” director and co-writer Hannah Macpherson (T@gged) tells Tudum. “Your head could almost explode.” 

But don’t worry — we’re here to help. Read on for your guide to the killer twists and turns of Time Cut.

Allen Fraser

Who killed Summer?

As the film’s third act reveals, Summer’s killer is none other than the future self of her classmate Quinn (Griffin Gluck), a bullied teen who befriends Lucy (Bailey) when she travels back in time. But why did the affable nerd snap? To explain that, we’ll have to travel back (or forward?) in time ourselves. 

When the film opens in the present day, Lucy lives in the shadow of her older sister, Summer. Twenty years prior, Summer was murdered by a masked killer, one of four who died in the Sweetly killings. Lucy never met her sister, and her family has never quite recovered from her death. When the bright young teen stumbles onto a time machine, she’s catapulted back to 2003. 

“I’m going back and meeting this sister who I’d never met before, and I’m seeing this light in her and connecting the dots of my own life,” Bailey says of her character’s journey. As she and Summer grow closer, Lucy becomes convinced that she has to prevent her sister’s murder — at any cost. Lucy was born out of her parents’ grief; if Summer survives, she may never exist.

“Lucy has to literally choose between her sister’s life and her own existence,” Macpherson says. “I just thought that was so brilliant. To be able to dig into the thematics of family — what are we willing to sacrifice?”

Even as she’s fighting to protect Summer, Lucy also alters history even further, rescuing Quinn from being dropped into a river by a group of bullies. In Summer’s timeline, this incident pushed Quinn down a path towards vengeance: his future self traveled back in time and killed Summer and her classmates for laughing at him. 

“We get to look at the opportunities that changed his life forever,” Macpherson says. “One person reaching out and becoming a friend where there was no friend can make a difference.” Lucy’s act of goodwill splits the timeline — the Quinn of the past remains good-natured, while the Quinn of the future becomes the time-traveling Sweetly Slasher, wreaking bloody revenge on his one-time tormentors.

Allen Fraser

Does Lucy save Summer?

Yes. After a heated confrontation, Lucy stabs Future Quinn through the heart, ending his reign of terror. Past Quinn is free to continue his life on the correct path.

The scenes that feature Gluck as both Past and Future Quinn were filmed in only one night. “He had to play opposite himself,” Macpherson says. “That was really fun to work out with the camera and his stunt double and his acting double, and also just a huge challenge for him in one night.” To make Quinn look 20 years older, the production employed prosthetic aging makeup, but the real magic trick was Gluck himself. “He’s really a chameleon,” Macpherson says.

Finally, Summer and Lucy are free to live happily ever after — in 2003, of course, as Lucy’s timeline no longer exists. Summer also finally embraces her romantic relationship with her classmate Emmy (Megan Best). All’s well that ends well in Sweetly.

But it wasn’t the only possibility for the film’s ending. “We had a variety of different options for endings, including both sisters being alive in the present day,” Macpherson says. “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.”

For her part, Gentry got to play both the film’s first victim and one of its final girls. “Best of both worlds,” she says. “I had a bucket list where I was like, ‘I want to be slashed.’ ” She got her wish — and got to live happily ever after.

Time Cut is now streaming on Netflix.