I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) review: Nostalgia’s overrated
The bar wasn’t exactly high for the I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel, considering the original films weren’t exactly the best. However, I still came away disappointed.
Set almost 30 years after the original Southport massacre, the film follows a new bunch of twentysomethings: Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danica (Madelyn Cline), Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) and Teddy (Tyriq Withers). Set exactly one year after they’re involved in a car accident resulting in a man’s death, they start being picked off one by one by the Fisherman and his pointy hook. Naturally, they track down the survivors of the original massacre – Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) – for help.
I had a real issue with the inciting accident. In the original, the group hits a man with their car and actively throws him in the water to cover it up. In this version, they are just witnesses to a car accident and don’t do enough to help. It undermines the whole premise because they’re really not responsible for it and don’t deserve to be on the receiving end of someone’s revenge.
With legacy sequels, it’s really hard to get the balance right. You have to honour the originals and deliver the nostalgia factor as well as do something new (it’s not a reboot after all). Director/co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who made the excellent Do Revenge, is too loyal to the originals – to her detriment. For example, she could have come up with a completely new opening accident, but she chooses to almost replicate it. Why does it have to be a car accident on that section of road again?! It could have been anything.
However, she throws that out of the window with the bold third-act twist. It takes a big swing that will be very divisive. I respected the fact that Robinson ripped up the rulebook – after staying so close to it – and did something different and shocking, but I didn’t buy it from a character perspective. In fact, the whole killer reveal was a massive letdown because the motivations were poorly written and explained away too quickly, and they simply didn’t track!
The biggest saving grace is the way OG final girl Julie is treated in this movie. She has the right amount of screen time, and her storyline feels correct. Wonders is basically the new Julie in this iteration, and she does a decent job, but the standout newcomer was Outer Banks star Cline as the rich Danica (basically Helen Shivers again). She has so much personality and fab line deliveries, and gets better and better as the movie goes on. She seems to fare the best with the cringe dialogue, which felt so forced and unnatural at times.
At one point in the movie, a character says, “Nostalgia’s overrated,” and I have to say, in the case of IKWYDLS, I agree. The franchise has never had the same fanbase as Scream, and this legacy sequel would have benefited from more original ideas and trying to forge its own path. Instead, it seems to be borrowing too much from the originals while also working from the Scream 5 playbook.
I did mildly enjoy the silly slasher fun of IKWYDLS, but the beginning and ending annoyed me so much!
In cinemas now