It knows how things were done last century.
There’s profound irony in 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer being an “Original Films” production given there’s barely a single frame of originality in it. Sadly, it’s the only irony on offer for a movie that’s so lacking a sense of the ironic it may very well induce cinematic anaemia in its audience. Less a resurrection than an exhumation, it digs up the mouldy corpse of the franchise and props it up at a jaunty angle hoping to fool casual viewers that its bursting with vigour and vitality, a metatextual Weekend At Bernies.
Where the original I Know What You Did Last Summer (and the somewhat less original I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) lived in the shadow of Scream, this new reboot-quel version really wants to be Scream. Unfortunately, the Scream it wants to be is the Gen Z pandering Scream of 2022. It may be recycling the plot of the first film, but it’s doing so while trying on Scream’s hand-me-downs and hoping nobody notices the baggy fit.
The plot is largely exactly the same as the first movie, albeit with space carved out for more of the legacy cast than you’re probably expecting. There are, though a couple of differences. One is an intriguing plot point that’s unique to this movie that unfortunately largely goes unexplored. In the Scream continuity, the Woodsboro murders have become legend, both at a local and multimedia level, but in I Know What You Did Last Summer we’re presented with a town that has deliberately and systematically tried to suppress its sordid past to the point where our group of good-looking youngsters are oblivious to the events of thirty years previously. The “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” angle would have been a fresh, interesting angle from which to interrogate the events of the previous films but this movie has no interest in that, preferring to simply reprise the indiscriminate killings and parade of obvious red herrings the first two made their stock in trade.
The second difference is the most vexing, though, and will ultimately break the movie if you can’t ignore it. In the first one, the kids made the panicked and improbable decision to compound their car accident by deliberately, repeatedly attempting to murder the man they hit with their car. Now I’m aware that American justice is something of a fungible commodity these days but even then, there’s just no way on Earth the kids are culpable for the inciting incident that kicks off the story this time around – or at least nothing even the most inept and jaded public defender couldn’t have got them acquitted for. It’s a flaw that’s plagued every iteration of the franchise – no matter how you slice it, you have to take a big fucking leap away from logic to make the set-up work in the first place.
Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers and Sarah Pidgeon make for a decently likeable ensemble (although Hauer-King’s recent heel-turn in Doctor Who makes him suspect numero uno for a while) but their characterisations feel rote and their bleatingly self-pity trauma dialogue becomes incredibly tiresome incredibly quickly, especially as all they really experienced was witnessing some reckless driving end in an accident. The rest of the suspiciously Antipodean-looking town of Southport, North Carolina is populated by locals and visitors alike who slog their way through dialogue that feels like it was assembled by feeding 100 hours of Riverdale into an off-the-shelf AI.
The nods to legacy horror are there, just drained of commitment. If you’re going to go full meta, you need to swing harder than this. Instead, the film tick boxes its way through iconic moments from its predecessors, including standout moments which were already better referenced by Scary Movie.
A limp and empty attempt at commentary on community image, trauma, maybe even gentrification, if you squint, I Know What You Did Last Summer seems content to be ambient horror: a generative rehash of an already perilously generic horror formula. If you really want to revisit I Know What You Did Last Summer, throw on your JNCOs, dig out the VHS, pour yourself a Blue WKD, and enjoy a story that at least had the decency to commit to its silliness. This one? It knows what it did. And while it hopes you’ll remember, you’ll be trying hard to forget it.
