Time Cut ending explained: Who is the killer in the Netflix film?

Genre bending film Time Cut is riding high on Netflix, and viewers are tuning in to watch in droves - but who was the killer in the end? We take a look.

Netflix movie Time Cut has a little bit of everything - time travel, murder, a slasher on the loose, and some good old teenage high school antics. Lucy is a high school senior and budding amateur inventor. She also lives in the shadow of her murdered sister who died before she was born. Accidentally finding herself transported back to 2003, the year her sister was murdered when a serial killer struck, Lucy has a decision to make.

She's left torn between solving the mystery that has destroyed her parents and her hometown and saving the sister she never knew, or altering the future and risk no longer existing in the new timeline. Some viewers have been left with questions about the ending, similar to those left hanging in the air about the Woman of The Hour ending, and the Showtrial season 2 ending. If you love deep dives into the endings of TV shows and films and still have questions about the final scenes of Time Cut, look no further.

Time Cut ending explained

At the end of Time Cut, Lucy decides she will change the past, and will take the consequences. With Emmy saved from being murdered, she joins Lucy, Summer and Quinn to hatch a plan to get rid of the killer and try and get Lucy back to her own time.

It doesn't take long for this plan to be scuppered when the gang realise the killer was from the future, and it's none other than Quinn. He'd been a bullied nerd during high school, and the trauma he suffered transformed into a dangerous hatred for those who'd made his life a misery.

Particularly angry with Summer for not wanting to be his girlfriend, Quinn built the time machine to travel back in time and get revenge on those he perceived to have wronged him - this resulted in the murder of Summer and her friends.

However, with Lucy messing around with time, she manages to stop Quinn forming and carrying out his murderous plan. She manages to drag older Quinn into younger Quinn's garage, and sends him into the future through the time machine. The pair then get into a fight, before Lucy stabs and kills the slasher version of Quinn.

Summer in 2003 is saved, and Lucy uses the time machine to return to 2024, only to find that she no longer exists - she was only conceived after her sister died, when her parents wanted to ease their grief and fill the void left by Summer. In the new timeline, they decided not to have her.

Lucy then decides to stay with her sister in 2003, along with the nice version of Quinn. Summer also also gets the chance to embrace her budding romantic relationship with Emmy instead of facing an early death, and the Sweetly Slasher never comes into existence.

Writer and director Hannah Macpherson explains to Netflix Tudum that she toyed with many different ideas for the film's ending. "We had a variety of different options for endings, including both sisters being alive in the present day," she says, adding, "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."

She also speaks about the film's message of the power of redemption, saying of Quinn's story, "We get to look at the opportunities that changed his life forever. One person reaching out and becoming a friend where there was no friend can make a difference."

Viewers have been quick to find plot holes and obvious faults with the ending, as is common with the time travel genre. However, Hannah Macpherson accepts this and isn't worried about it at all. Her response about the final moments is "It just felt so good, time-travel logic be damned."

Time Cut: Age rating

For those wondering whether to watch the films with teens or children, the age rating is TV-14 meaning it should be avoided by those under the age of 14. There's only one violent scene in the film, where a teen is stabbed in the neck with a broken DVD disc.

The teenager is later seen with a piece of the disc protruding from his neck. There's also no real suspense or jump scares, and a lot of those tuning in see the film as harmless, nostalgic fun.