I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and the cast includes Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Joshua Orpin, Freddie Prinze Jr, Jennifer Love Hewitt.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is a film I wasn't going in with high expectations, in fact my expectations were incredibly modest where I was hoping for something serviceable, much like the original.
And I didn't even get that.
The setup closely mirrors the 1997 film where a group of attractive young adults make a tragic mistake and choose to cover it up. Naturally, a hook-wielding figure in a fisherman’s slicker begins stalking them, armed with cryptic messages and a lot of sharp objects.
This time, the group includes Danica (Madelyn), Chase Sui Wonders (Ava), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and a handful of other underwritten friends. They’re on a celebratory road trip that takes them through the on-the-nose location of “Reaper’s Curve,” which, unsurprisingly, becomes the site of the story’s inciting incident.
What follows is a sequence of predictable horror elements, weakly executed red herrings, and emotionally hollow revelations.
The film’s most glaring flaw though is its lack of interesting characters. None of the new cast members manage to stand out, not because of their talent (many of them have proven themselves in other work), but because the script gives them so little to work with.
They function more as archetypes than people, which is a common sin in the genre, but one that particularly stands out here. When the killings begin, there’s no sense of loss or urgency, and you’re not rooting for anyone because the film hasn’t asked you to.
When Prinze Jr. and Hewitt finally appear, they manage to bring some screen presence that only highlights how flat everything else is. Their performances aren’t anything amazing, but they offer a glimpse of what the film could have been.
The cinematography is decent enough, as it's quite moody and polished, with a few moments that effectively lean into classic slasher aesthetics. The production design and lighting choices do a lot of heavy lifting here actually, and that's not a good thing, because that cannot save a weak structure.
The narrative pacing drags in the middle third, padded with scenes that seem to exist only to stretch the runtime. Worse, the plot feels overworked, like the writers kept adding twists, subplots, and misleads until the logic collapses in on itself. By the time the big twist arrives, it’s not shocking so much as exhausting.
There were flashes of potential here though. The opening sequence showed promise, and there are one or two inventive kills. The music occasionally enhances the tension, and there’s evidence that director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson does have some real affection for the source material.
But affection alone isn’t enough, because without a strong story or characters who matter, all the visual polish and throwback references feel quite hollow.
In the end, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) plays like a group project where everyone had a different idea of what kind of film they were making.
The nostalgia is surface-level, and the horror and emotional core is pretty much missing, and it doesn’t do enough to justify its own existence, either as a continuation of a franchise, or as a standalone slasher.
It’s a film that feels like it should matter more than it does, and that’s perhaps the biggest disappointment of all.
Some ''legacies'' should just be left in the past.
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