I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

Twenty-seven years after the hook first found its mark, the franchise returns with a fresh set of photogenic young people and a familiar set of problems. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson directs a cast led by Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders, with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. hauled back from 1997 to lend gravity to a screenplay that mostly wants to reach the next kill. The premise holds up: five friends, one covered-up car crash, one fisherman with a hook and a grievance. It is a sequel in the purest sense. It knows what the audience did last summer, which was pay for roughly this same movie.

On the matter of cultural consciousness, the film is a curious specimen. Its young ensemble is noticeably more diverse than the slasher norm, with Tyriq Withers and Brandy Norwood among the players, and nobody in the script feels obliged to announce it. That restraint is welcome. A woman directs, and the women on screen do the surviving and the shooting, though the architecture stays snugly inside the final-girl tradition. The town of Southport suppresses a killing spree to protect its tourist season, and a politician buries his son's crime, which registers as mild civic rot instead of an argument about anything larger.

The film lectures no one. It has no interest in climate, in body image, in neurological difference, or in rewriting the historical record, and it offers no romantic pairing outside the conventional one. It wants to move bodies through a maritime-themed haunted house and collect the ticket money. This is not a complaint. A genre picture that declines to sermonize has its own integrity, however modest. The remainder is a competent, slightly tired retread that reunites the survivors, stages a twist or two, and leaves the door open for more. The hook, evidently, has not retired.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}