I Know What You Did Last Summer
Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Writers: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Sam Lansky, Leah McKendrick
Cast: Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr.
There is something inherently bonkers about the premise of I Know What You Did Last Summer, a new legacy sequel to the 1997 film (and its first sequel) of the same name. It's a film about a group of friends who happen to live in the same small town where a legendary string of murders befell a different group of friends almost 30 years ago, and through pure happenstance, find themselves facing a killer who follows the exact same modus operandi for a new set of reasons. It's a film that, almost immediately, asks you to believe in lightning striking the same place twice in almost exactly the same way.
With a premise like that, you can basically play things in one of two ways. You can do what the recent Scream revivals did and treat the original films like sacred, unbreakable texts upon which everything hinges, or you can loosen up, have a little fun with it, and maybe take things in a different, refreshing direction.
Fortunately for us all, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's film does the latter, delivering a summer movie experience that's fun, thrilling, and packed with inventive new ways to use the hallmarks of its franchise.
In the present day in the Atlantic coastal town of Southport, a group of twentysomething friends have reunited because two of them, beauty queen Danica (Madelyn Cline) and privileged local golden boy Teddy (Tyriq Withers), just got engaged. Much of the early action follows Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Madelyn's best friend, who's back in town for the engagement party and contemplating a reunion with her ex, Teddy's best friend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King). It feels like old times, for good or for ill.
Unfortunately, the Fourth of July engagement party fun is shattered when the foursome, along with their old high school friend Steve (Sarah Pidgeon) are involved in a car accident that ends with one man dead. Worried about their futures, the quintet flees the scene while Teddy's father (Billy Campbell) — who's in the process of transforming Southport in his own dream real estate image — smooths over all the details. The five friends vow to never tell anyone what really happened that night, and go their separate ways.
Fast forward a year, and Danica gets a mysterious note, and you'll never believe what it says: "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Someone's out for revenge, and if Ava, Danica, and their friends are going to survive, they'll have to reach out to the only two people who know what it's like to live through being stalked by a hook-wielding killer in fisherman gear: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the only survivors of the attacks in the original film.
But even before it leans back into the franchise's familiar characters, this version of I Know What You Did Last Summer works to find its own vibe, and it mostly succeeds. The film's first act wastes no time in getting the action going, setting up a moral dilemma for its characters that's arguably even thornier and weirder than what's in the original film, and then twisting the narrative just so until they're stalked by The Fisherman with his hook and a few new tools of his trade. It doesn't take long to get to the film's first slasher kill, and Robinson makes sure it's a memorable one, less about gore (though there is plenty of that scattered throughout) and more about pain. This is a franchise built on taking privileged, happy youths with their whole lives ahead of them and putting through a moral and physical wringer, and despite a few narrative stumbles (it perhaps takes one too many logical leaps to get where it needs to be), the film throws us right back into that pressure cooker.
That might be enough to sustain the film alone, but Robinson and her game young cast, led by Wonders and Cline, are also eager to remind their audience that these movies are supposed to be fun. I Know What You Did Last Summer 2025 is unexpectedly, often almost shockingly funny, laced with jokes about generational differences, the overconfidence of its characters, and humor built on the sheer lunacy of the story these young people are living. Cline in particular marshals remarkable comedic timing, and the whole cast projects a sense of young people so in over their heads that they simply lose all sense of what counts as an appropriate reaction to the violence. If you were being stalked by a killer in a fisherman's slicker, and that killer was sending you notes to remind you of that fact, you might go a little crazy too.
The film's greatest success is its deft tonal balancing, its ability to lay out all of this humor and strangeness within its characters while also looking back on the franchise's past and finding some very cool new ways for The Fisherman as a killer to operate. It's a film that doesn't take itself too seriously, but it's also a film unafraid to pile on the horror and genuine emotion when necessary. It's not a self-aware slasher in the meta-textual sense, but by the time the third act rolls around, I Know What You Did Last Summer has grown into a remarkably savvy play on our expectations for a movie of its kind, and while the turns its takes might not work for everyone, they certainly worked for me. We're living in a very good time for new slasher stories, and this is the latest addition to an impressive contemporary roster.
