I Know What You Did Last Summer

The Burden of the Hook

There’s something grimly soothing about Hollywood’s refusal to let the 1990s stay buried. We keep hauling these old movies back up, thumping them on the chest, waiting for them to spit out seawater and matter again. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s 2025 version of *I Know What You Did Last Summer* opens on a sweeping aerial shot of the North Carolina coast, directly echoing Jim Gillespie’s 1997 film. It’s a statement right away. *We know exactly why you came*, the movie seems to say as the dark score rolls in. But Robinson, who was so sharp with the venom of *Do Revenge*, isn’t content to simply replay the familiar beats. She seems more interested in carving into the whole idea of the "requel," that miserable studio obsession of the last decade, and seeing what spills out.



Whether that works for you probably comes down to how much patience you have for a movie that looks openly irritated by its own existence. The setup is pure slasher boilerplate: five glossy, unbearable twenty-somethings, with Chase Sui Wonders and Madelyn Cline out front, make a terrible car-related mistake on the Fourth of July and decide to hide it. A year later, somebody in a hooded slicker starts sending notes and swinging a harpoon around. But Robinson and her script immediately soak that old framework in abrasive Gen-Z therapy language. Characters say things like "gentrifislaytion" when talking about the town’s economic rebound after all those earlier murders. Yes, it’s obnoxious. It also feels calculated. As William Bibbiani of TheWrap noted, it's "like watching an 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' movie directed by the Gremlins, if the Gremlins went to film school, paid attention and got good grades."

You can feel that tension most clearly in Chase Sui Wonders as Ava. Wonders has this alert, inward stillness on screen that already stood out in *Bodies Bodies Bodies*, and here she gives the movie a little actual unease to hold onto. Midway through, there’s a scene during what’s supposed to be a sexy hookup with Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) that veers off when a real trauma response gets misread as a sexual kink. It’s deeply uncomfortable, and Robinson shoots it with a cramped intimacy that seems borrowed from a heavier, sadder film. Wonders lets Ava fold in on herself; all the performed cool disappears, and what’s left is a scared kid trapped inside her own nervous system. It’s one of the rare points where the movie lets the damage feel like damage.



Then there’s the legacy-cast question. Bringing back Jennifer Love Hewitt as Julie James and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Ray Bronson was always the bait, the bright little hook everyone could see coming. What Robinson does with them is bolder than I expected, even if it gets a little messy on the way there. Without getting into the specifics of the very divisive third-act turn, the movie ends up staring hard at what surviving a slasher story might actually leave behind in someone’s head. Julie worked through her trauma; Ray let his rot. Prinze, whose whole 90s image leaned on that sweet, dopey, golden-retriever sincerity, twists the remnants of it into something sour and genuinely sad. When a legacy survivor’s inability to heal starts to feel like the real monster, it becomes obvious Robinson isn’t honoring the original so much as dissecting it.

Which brings us to the end. Hewitt, to her credit, gets to yell her famous "What are you waiting for?!" into the night one more time. But just before that, she drops the line that really tells you what the movie thinks: "Nostalgia is worthless." I’m not convinced the film fully earns a statement that blunt and cynical. You can’t completely denounce the nostalgia machine while also cashing in on it. Even so, the last twenty minutes have such a grubby, chaotic pulse that I couldn’t help admiring them.



This isn’t some new horror landmark. The middle drags, and even with some effective practical stunt work in the harpoon scenes, the script has a bad habit of spelling out things the camera has already made clear. Still, I haven’t quite shaken its refusal to behave. We keep turning to these franchises to make us feel younger, to hand back the rush of sneaking into an R-rated movie at the mall. *I Know What You Did Last Summer* stares at that impulse, snorts at it, and suggests that our fixation on the past might be the ugliest thing in the room.