The legacy sequel I Know What You Did Last Summer is caught between a rock and a hard place. For starters, it’s a rebooting of a film that was simply decent for what it was: a serviceable late 90s slasher horror that just so happened to be riding high on the success of its screenwriter’s previous success, Scream. Working from something where the quality bar was already set at a reasonable height, director and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (the very fun Do Revenge) could go in a number of interesting directions to update the franchise, bringing new characters together with some old favourites for a mash-up in the same vein as… well, the most recent Scream movies. But instead of effortlessly offering up a bunch of new, attractive young people to meet their maker at the end of a fisherman’s hook, this take on I Know What You Did Last Summer is laboured, fussy, and inorganic. It tries way too hard to seem modern and insistent, offering not much fun along the way outside of some jump scares that at least made the person sitting next to me jump out of their skin. Watching their reactions was a lot more fun than actually watching I Know What You Did Last Summer.
It’s once again the Fourth of July weekend in the coastal town of Southport, which is no longer a place where the wealthy cottagers and local fishermen co-exist in harmony, but now a full on gentrified suburb with a yacht in every dock. College student Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) is returning home to attend the engagement party of her high school bestie, Danica (Madelyn Cline), to her wealthy, real estate heir sweetheart, Teddy (Tyriq Withers). While there, Ava also reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Milo (Jonah Haver-King), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), an estranged friend who’s had a rough go of things. After the party, they all get stoned and drive off to an infamous stretch of cliffside road where they can best see the fireworks. They end up causing an accident where a pick-up truck hops a guardrail and plummets over the side of a cliff. Teddy’s dad is the mayor (Billy Campbell), so everything is covered up quietly, and they all reluctantly agree to never talk about what happened that night.
One year later, Ava returns home again for Danica’s bridal shower, only this time she’s engaged to a completely different lunkhead (Joshua Orpin). It’s there that a note surfaces saying that someone knows what happened last year, and it’s not long after that when the bodies start piling up. It’s all eerily reminiscent of a similar killing spree that happened back in 1997, of which there were only two survivors, estranged sweethearts Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who now lives out of town and works as a psychology professor, and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), who’s Stevie’s boss at a local bar. The newly terrorized group looks to the past to find out how best to stay alive against this seemingly rejuvenated fisherman threat.
I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t take a long time to set up, which is nice, but it takes a long time to start paying off in any meaningful or entertaining way. Every time Robinson and co-writer Sam Lansky happen upon an interesting wrinkle that could be teased out or used as a red herring, they frustratingly find a way to cut their own best ideas off at the knees, favouring unimaginative set pieces that could be from any number of better slashers over anything smart or genuinely scary. This is a film that needs immediate gratification, and it kills the vibe constantly. The pacing (which is molasses slow, in spite of the high body count) and visual style (which includes some bafflingly bad editing that misses some of the most important angles and beats of scenes) are akin to a streaming series, not a theatrically releasable movie.
Ditto the setting and dialogue, which is on the level of a typical teen-baiting streaming series, complete with laboured, inorganic dialogue that sounds topical and reverential, but is really just showy and out of touch. It’s welcome that I Know What You Did Last Summer is trying to be an unapologetically feminist and proudly queer take on the slasher genre (with plenty of self-referential commentary), but it would help more if these characters were actual flesh and blood people rather than bodies for the grist mill or one dimensional sounding boards and cynical sign posts. I Know What You Did Last Summer is further away from author Lois Duncan’s source material than ever before, which is fine, but the recalculated trajectory here is overblown in the extreme. The dialogue is clunky, the characters are bland, and nothing that leads up to the film’s big killer reveal makes a lick of logical or logistical sense. Say what one will about the overall quality of the 1997 original, but at least that film knew exactly what it wanted to do. I have no idea what Robinson’s film is trying to do outside of merely existing.
The cast is pretty good, though. Wonders continues to show just how much potential they have as a star, and has great chemistry alongside Cline, who strikes a nice balance between being a spoiled little rich girl and a good friend. Withers has a few memorable scenes as the token alpha-dork of the group, and Gabbriette Bechtel steals all of their scenes as a sexpot, hyperactive true crime podcaster who just so happens to arrive in town as a new murder spree is unfolding. It’s nice to have Hewitt back, and she brings an appropriate amount of gravity and trauma to her returning heroine, but it’s Prinze who has the best showing here, genuinely putting in his best work as the returning Ray. None of the faults in I Know What You Did Last Summer can lie with the cast. If anything, they’re all that’s keeping Robinson’s film on the rails.
At a certain point in I Know What You Did Last Summer I came to a sobering conclusion. No matter who was revealed as the killer at the end, I wasn’t going to care because I felt zero investment or excitement in what was happening. No big twist, reveal, surprise, or final battle was going to save this thing. It would’ve taken a miracle of storytelling to turn me around on this thing. And sure enough, the villain shows their face, and I couldn’t care less outside of remarking just how illogical and pulled out of thin air it all seemed. Robinson knows how to do an effective near miss or a well timed bump in the night, but they never cracked the code on how to update a film where there was already room for improvement. This is a boring addendum to a slasher film that could’ve stopped easily while it was ahead.
I Know What You Did Last Summer opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, July 18, 2025.
