By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders and Jonah Hauer-King
Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Written by Sam Lansky and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Sony/Columbia
“Nostalgia is overrated,” says returning actress Jennifer Love Hewitt in the new I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. A line like that in a decades-later legacy sequel is really asking for it, though it’s clear that the filmmakers are having a little fun here at their own expense. The joke would just land a little stronger if the whole movie wasn’t so dependent on nostalgia, at the expense of any meaningful variations on the themes and plotting it’s revisiting from the popular 1997 film.
It’s (ahem) 28 years later, and we’re back in Southport, North Carolina–where, as so often happens in this kind of movie, no one has a Southern accent. (It’s also once again an NC where the topography much more closely resembles the California coast, though this film was shot in Australia.) And as before, the focus is on a small group of young friends dealing with the aftermath of a fatal accident on a lonely road that they’ve chosen not to speak of to anyone else. The lengthy year-ago prologue introduces us to Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), who attends the engagement party of wealthy friends Danica (Madelyn Cline) and Teddy (Tyriq Withers), also attended by her old flame Milo (Jonah Hauer-King). It’s the 4th of July, and after a good deal of expositional dialogue, and joined by old pal Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), they drive to some nearby cliffs to check out the fireworks–and wind up involved in that deadly crash.
There’s a brief suggestion that the death the group will be covering up will be one of their own, which would have been a much more interesting variation on the original movie. And this time, they’re not quite as directly responsible for the demise as the characters in ’97, which dilutes the emotional stakes somewhat. Still, though they do call the police, the group decides to keep their part in the accident a secret. Then, a year later at Danica’s bridal shower–celebrating her impending nuptials to a new groom, Wyatt (Joshua Orpin)–the gifts include an anonymous card reading “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.”
That’s the only way the fateful phrase appears in the new film, though the script by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who also directed) and Sam Lansky takes most of its key cues from the previous I KNOW WHAT YOU DID… A killer garbed in a dark rain slicker and armed with a large fish hook (and a spear gun), who proceeds with loud thumping footsteps, begins stalking and killing the quintet and those around them, as they desperately try to determine their stalker’s identity and save their skins. This time around, the young protagonists aren’t as compellingly haunted by their past misdeed, and they’re not terribly interesting in general (the guys in particular are pretty indistinguishable). The only real spark is provided by Gabbriette Bechtel as Tyler, a true-crime podcaster Ava hooks up with on her flight to Southport. Though this kind of character is bidding to become a new cliché of 21st-century genre cinema, Bechtel brings sufficient funky energy to the role to make one wish Tyler would become one of the key roles rather than a colorful supporting player.
The leads do what they can with the thin material, though of course the biggest casting news here is the return of Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. to their ’97 stamping grounds as survivors Julie James and Ray Bronson. Julie is now a college professor lecturing on (and still afflicted with) PTSD, and Ray runs a local bar; they were once married, and Ray isn’t thrilled with Julie dredging up the past. There’s the potential for a dramatic exploration of how people can never truly escape life-altering events, and also hints of class conflict and corruption via Teddy’s father Grant (Billy Campbell), who’s trying to develop Southport into a new Hamptons, but neither one receives more than cursory examination.
Still, the real issue is whether I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER 2025 delivers as a horror movie, and perhaps current youth audiences who haven’t caught up with the original might find some suspense and thrills here. While the murders are bloodier than they were the first time around, true terror is lacking, and Robinson sometimes depends on the very loud score to goose the mood. This works in one early scene, where a slaying downstairs is intercut with a quiet, introspective moment upstairs, but the staging and shooting of the mayhem in general isn’t distinctive or outrageous enough to have much impact.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER contains the expected little shout-outs to its Jim Gillespie-directed, Kevin Williamson-scripted inspiration: There’s a character named Judah Gillespie and a “Williamson Boating” sign is seen, and Milo’s last name, Griffin, might be a stray reference to original source author Lois Duncan, who also wrote KILLING MR. GRIFFIN. Also, at one point Ray makes a jokey reference to the events of 1998’s I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. The new film can at least be said to be better than that sequel, whose wrapup contains some of the dumbest revelations in all of slasher-film history, yet its own final act contains a twist that’s become overly familiar in recent years, followed by a closing scene that screams “test-audience-mandated reshoot.” Then there’s a mid-end-credits bit calculated to get a rise out of the franchise’s fans, and it did receive an enthusiastic response from the crowd at the screening this writer attended. Their reactions were pretty tepid for the rest of the film, though, so it remains to be seen whether its own clearly intended sequel actually comes to pass.
