If nostalgia is a currency, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) spends it like a drunken sailor, then tries to write the charges off as a “tribute.” It’s a shiny legacy sequel that tiptoes in on soft soles, screams “REMEMBER THIS?,” then slips on its own glossy blood puddle. You can almost hear the studio note: “Make it like Scream, but wetter.” What we get is less a movie and more a séance where the franchise’s past glories are summoned, berated, and sent back to the afterlife with a restraining order.
Jennifer Kaytin Robinson directs with the confidence of someone who’s been handed your college years and a mandate to monetize it. She’s not without flair—there are a few crisp compositions and one pleasingly lurid yacht sequence—but the script (co-written with Sam Lansky from a story by Leah McKendrick and Robinson) mistakes plotting for tension. Yes, the whiteboard is full: secret-keeping twenty-somethings, a politically connected dad, a true-crime podcaster, and more red herrings than an Icelandic fishery. But none of it carries weight; it just clanks. By the third ominous note card that reads “I KNOW…,” you’ll wish the killer would pivot to “I proofread what you did last summer” and end everyone’s suffering.
Our new group—Madelyn Cline’s Danica, Chase Sui Wonders’ Ava, Jonah Hauer-King’s Milo, Tyriq Withers’ Teddy, plus assorted friends, fiancés, and fodder—do the thing that attractive coastal people have done since 1997: they cause a tragic accident, then hold a committee meeting about ethics. Calling the police is considered, then promptly murdered by ambition, denial, and a politician father who steps in like a fixer from a broadcast drama that airs after 9-1-1. One year later, the note arrives, the hook gleams, and we’re back to Southport where the tourism board apparently survived three movies and is now powered entirely by trauma exploitation and fireworks.
The kills? Competent, occasionally inventive, rarely memorable. There’s a decent shock in a cemetery, a gnarly strangulation that at least commits to the bit, and a yacht finale that earns style points if not logic. The Fisherman’s return should be a mythic event—he’s the franchise’s Darth Vader in galoshes—but the movie can’t decide whether he’s a ghost, a symbol, or a trademark. The mask-and-slicker iconography lands; the identity games don’t. When the reveal arrives (Stevie!—and then, surprise, Ray!), the movie expects us to clap like trained seals because it remembered names we liked in 1997. Instead, it plays like Scooby-Doo for people who own ring lights: “And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if not for these emotionally available millennials and their speargun.”
Freddie Prinze Jr., to his credit, gives a grounded performance as Ray—rumpled and bruised. But turning Ray into a co-conspirator raging at a town that ruined his life is the kind of “subversion” that reads edgy in a meeting and petty on screen. It doesn’t deepen the mythology; it narrows it. Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie James returns as the franchise’s North Star—battle-weary and somehow still game. Hewitt is the rare legacy player who can sell both the capital-S Scream Queen operatics and the smaller grace notes. When Julie clocks that the nightmare is back, the movie briefly hums.
Among the newbies, Chase Sui Wonders fares best, mining Ava’s moral anxiety for something human beneath all the hushed exposition. Madelyn Cline has presence but is stymied by a character who’s written as “wealthy best friend with a calendar.” Jonah Hauer-King’s Milo gets some boy-next-doomed pathos before he’s turned into atmospheric décor. Tyriq Withers’ Teddy is a frat-curdled golden boy in the way that leans broad rather than incisive; he exists mainly to light the fuse on the cover-up and eventually greet the hook.
Tonally, the film wants to be a glossy summer nightmare with a conscience. It talks about addiction and rehab through Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon, trying hard to bring rawness to a role that asks her to be both avenging angel and exposition jukebox). Then it weaponizes that backstory in a third-act villain speech that cheapens the subject into motive-mad libs: “He understood me, you didn’t, therefore hook.” It’s not offensive so much as lazy, the cinematic equivalent of citing a TED Talk and calling it depth.
Visually, the movie overachieves in spots. The Southport nightscapes are melancholy; the Fourth of July palette is candy-coated doom. There’s a clever mirrored shot in a church that briefly suggests the film might have ideas about guilt and confession (it doesn’t). Robinson stages the cat-and-mouse beats with clarity… But the scare grammar rarely surprises. You can set your Apple Watch by the audio sting to visual reveal ratio, and if you’ve seen a window, a bathroom, or a closet before, you’ve seen the jump scares.
The true-crime podcaster character (Gabbriette Bechtel as Tyler) arrives exactly as you fear: ring light in spirit, content hungry in soul. His inclusion is supposed to critique the voyeurism economy; instead, he’s just another chew toy for the Fisherman. A better movie would either lean into the satire or excise it; this one nods toward commentary like it’s paying respects from the car window.
There’s a recurring motif of Southport protecting its image—cops shrugging, politicians smoothing, townsfolk prioritizing tourism over truth. You can work with that. Imagine a slasher that uses the hook as a literal and figurative tool for dragging submerged sins to the surface. But outside of a town hall scene where Ray plays city-council flamethrower, the movie treats civic rot like a side quest.
As a sequel, it’s busy retrofitting. It name-checks Ben Willis like Beetlejuice; it leaf-blows the graves of Helen Shivers and the ’97 victims for vibe points. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s presence—however brief—is a bittersweet gut punch, a reminder of how much charisma can do when a film trusts it. Brandy’s Karla cameo is pure bait: grinning, inviting, promising a better party down the dock that you suspect will also be cancelled due to plot.
Is it scary? Occasionally. Is it fun? Intermittently, usually when the film stops sermonizing and starts slicing. Is it necessary? Only if your definition of “necessary” includes “keeps a trademark alive and turns trauma into an annuity.”
There are bright spots. A mid-movie chase through weathered docks has snap. The yacht showdown is messy in a charmingly nautical way. Hewitt and Prinze, even in compromised arcs, still have that 1990s sincerity. And Robinson shows she can orchestrate a set piece with clean geography and a mean little punchline.
But the movie keeps tripping over its own hook. It wants to be elegiac and vicious, clever and faithful, a morality play with a body count. Instead, it mostly feels like an exercise in brand management. The final beat—“It isn’t over”—lands not as a chill but as a calendar invite.
Verdict: File under “I Know What You Greenlit Last Fiscal Year.” If you’re here for the kills, you’ll get a competent handful. If you’re here to see Jennifer Love Hewitt stare down the abyss one more time, there’s a flicker of the old electricity. But as a whole, this is a reheated clam bake—technically edible, faintly rubbery, and served with a side of déjà vu. The Fisherman isn’t the only one going through the motions; the movie does too, tugging the line, waiting for a bite, and never quite landing the catch.
