“Nostalgia is overrated,” proclaims Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt). She’s just been through a convoluted domino of events and been thrust back into the fictional town of Southport, which is laughably not anything like the North Carolina it is supposed to take place in. It’s an odd line; we’ve just watched 100 minutes of nostalgia-ridden dialogue. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s legacy sequel I Know What You Did Last Summer is nothing if not packed with direct references to its 1997 origin film, a vapid, utterly hollow husk of revival. And when it isn’t copy-pasting lines straight out of Hewitt’s mouth it resorts to an almost impressively high level of pandering to its Gen Z audience.
The whole thing begs the question, “Who is this even for?” Why are we making a legacy sequel to a slasher that has only remained relevant as a footnote to its far superior cultural touchstone, Scream? Are either Millennials or Gen Z horror fans clamoring for a reintroduction to a franchise that died in the water before the turn of the century?
It’s a bizarre enterprise from the moment it starts with a first act leaden with exposition and absolutely zero actual characterization. Which is, unfortunately, a rough indicator of what’s to come; all we ever learn about the film’s lead, Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), is that her mother is dead and she’s apparently bisexual, two facts that notably are not character traits. Ava says lines like, “Can you believe we are at our best friend’s engagement party?” because we are too stupid to see that with our own eyes.
Regardless, there is something of a movie here, which is like if the already limp original had less stakes. On the Fourth of July, Ava, the betrothed Danica and Teddy (Madelyn Cline and Tyriq Withers, respectively), their somewhat estranged former friend Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) and Ava’s ex-boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) go on a late-night ride, smoke a blunt, fool around on a dark road, accidentally cause a driver to swerve and then (possibly) cause the car to fall off the cliff. A year later, they all get hunted by a slicker-clad killer with a fish hook.
The murderer is quite obviously aping the style of the killer from the first two films, so the young adults of the group, who are more definable by AI-like Gen Z jargon than by anything resembling actual human behavior, seek out the lone survivors of those massacres — Julie and Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), who are divorced now and living in bitter disdain of each other. If this is sounding familiar, it may be because it is almost pound for pound the exact same plot as the Scream reboot of 2022, which, unfortunately for Robinson, only continues the perception that this franchise cannot help but copy Wes Craven’s creation. There are bizarre metatextual references to the lore, which does not entirely make sense inside a franchise that is not metatextual by design. This means that the film has an almost impossible time justifying why a killer would be a copycat, or, more to the point, why someone would go through the trouble of putting on a massive and no doubt heavy slicker and clunky boots just to slice down twentysomethings in an increasingly theatrical manner.
Nearly nothing works here. When, near the end, two characters try to underline the whole journey by regurgitating internet speak of how “men would rather do BLANK rather than go to therapy,” Robinson seems to be making some broad gesture towards misogyny and sexism that the film has not otherwise supported in even the slightest sense. There are moments of tantalization, as in the minor suggestion that the entire police force is owned by one rich land developer, or the very Jaws-like implication of a local government that refuses to acknowledge danger to its people in order to capitulate to tourism, but these are essentially afterthoughts in an otherwise unmotivated, torridly illogical affair.
When the twists come — and I’ll admit the reveal of who is behind the bloodshed is surprising if for no other reason that it will break your brain with just how absurd it all is — there is almost nothing to hang a hat on. And the sociopolitics of the killer’s reveal suggests something quite cynical about the filmmaker’s perception of class, money and addiction. It is a movie that is nasty for every reason other than its rote kills.
Title: I Know What You Did Last Summer
Studio: Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures
Release date: July 18, 2025
Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Screenwriters: Sam Lansky & Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Cast: Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols, Freddie Prinze Jr, Jennifer Love Hewitt
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr 51 mins
