Film review – I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

My notes on I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

At once a remake, a sequel and a reboot, this is knowing enough to make a (funny) joke at the expense of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer – though if there were any references to the non-theatrical I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer or Amazon’s relatively recent go-round with the same material, they slid past me.  The 1997 ‘original’ – based on Lois Duncan’s YA suspense novel – is one of those okayish post-Scream slashers, so it isn’t as if this is trashing any cherished memories.  Directed and co-written by Jennifer Katyn Robinson – writer of Thor: Love and Thunder – this isn’t as smart, revisionist or playful as the recent redos of Slumber Party Massacre or Black Christmas, but at least gives it a good old go.

It’s nearly thirty years later, and another group of thoughtless young people more or less cause someone’s death – in a different way, after a feint like the one in the recent Pet Sematary – on a dangerous road outside the small coast town of Southport, USA (shot in Australia) … and a killer dressed in a slicker, wielding fisherman’s harpoon and hook starts a campaign against them, notably killing the people they love (or like or just hooked up with) rather than them.  The original had some 1990s stuff about the run-down town and social fractures in the friend group, and that’s updated – Grant Spencer (Billy Campbell), Dad of nepo jock Teddy (Tyriq Withers), has bought up real estate cheap in the wake of the original killings and remade the town as a tourist hub, incidentally buying up the still-useless police department and scrubbing useful true crime info from the internet.  Grant also helps cover up the death, but ‘croaker queen’ Danica (Madelyn Cline), mixed-up Aca (Chase Sui Wonders), downwardly mobile Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) and political aide Milo (Jonah Hauer-King – the baddie from last season’s Dr Who) go to pieces in different ways from guilt and anger … and things only get more complex when original massacre survivors Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr) get involved in the new case.  Even the dead ex croaker queen Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) gets a funny cameo.

The stalk-and-slash is okayish at best, in the IKWYDLS tradition, but the characters are mostly amusing.  Bizarrely, against all odds, Prinze jr gives his best performance as the now-grizzled, left-behind bar owner who’s seen it all before and is grumpy that the town has changed but the people haven’t.  It has a pretty decent whodunit element – not upto the Screams, but one up on the 1997 film where the guy who was killed and is being avenged turns out not to be dead.  Embedded in the end credits is another shout-out to ISKWYDLS – so this might not be the end of the winding road with too-low guardrails abutting a dangerous cliff.