Horror Movie Review: I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

Nostalgia… where would modern horror cinema be without out? For the past eight years we’ve been living in the world of ‘legacy sequels’, all thanks to the success of 2018’s Halloween. Which, itself, spawned a few more sequels. Since then, we’ve had legacy sequels to the likes of Scream, Candyman, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Exorcist. All to varied results, and the latest to get the legacy treatment is I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sam Lansky from a story by Leah McKendrick and Robinson, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) serves as sequel to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998). This means I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006) is ignored, but considering the supernatural slant that film has, that’s no real surprise.

What is a surprise is that, unlike other legacy sequels, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) refuses to do anything different and banks its success on the viewer’s nostalgic interest. Do you want to see the same thing effectively play out with only minor differences to separate the stories? Do you want returning characters from the first film here, regardless of if they fit or not? How about lines lifted and used in the most awkward of circumstances? All of this, and more, is what I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) offers, and I found it to be one of the most insulting watches of the year.

111 minutes long. That’s the running time for this slasher, and I suspect, like me, it will be enough to set off warning alarms in your head. No horror, least of a slasher, should be nearly 2 hours long.

So, what does I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) do with the time?

Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) is back in town, specifically Southport – the site of the original film’s events, for her best friend Danica’s (Madelyn Cline) engagement party. There, she runs into her ex-boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), reunites with Danica’s fiancé, Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and reconnects with her estranged friend Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon). As the party winds down, the group decide to go off and watch a big firework display from a cliffside road.

Of course, it’s dark and they’re drunk and high, so while messing around in the road, they inevitably cause a car to swerve, crash through the barrier, and sink beneath the waves. What a twist on the original events, eh? Inside the car was a man named Sam Cooper, and as a group, they decide to cover up his death, swearing to secrecy and using Teddy’s politician father, Grant (Billy Campbell), to cover up the accident.

One year later…

Ava is now back for Danica’s bridal shower, reuniting with the gang, as the recent past comes back to haunt them. Specifically, someone dressed in a fisherman’s slicker and wielding a hook. Someone with vengeance on their mind, but vengeance that might extend beyond what Ava and company did last summer. After all, this isn’t the first murder spree to occur in Southport, yet no-one seems to want to talk about what happened in 1997. That is until Ava seeks out two of the survivors, Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) hoping to get their help with uncovering the truth behind the person stalking and killing those around her.

I’ve got to keep this review tight, so I can’t just rant and rave about all the things wrong with this film, but goodness, is it a frustrating watch. With the most maddening thing being the absurd tone switches where it seems like it’s going for gory fun, and ends up being overly dramatic and serious, attempting to say something about trauma and not dealing with it. Which really would have been an interesting thing to fully explore, except the film’s approach is extremely half-assed and really just an excuse to include Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie James in the film and as justification for the twist, that many really won’t like.

It’s callback after callback, overshadowing everything new, and so often just for nostalgia’s sake. Where a dream sequence that allows Sarah Michelle Gellar to reprise her role is uncomfortably forced in and there’s an after credit-scene involving Brandy that might be the most awkward moment of the entire film. It’s the sort of stuff that treats the viewer with contempt, unwilling to even try and do something fresh, and all because it thinks all anyone cares about is Jennifer Love Hewitt saying, “what are you waiting for?” again and a joke reference to not running away to the Bahamas to escape the killer.

Maybe you do, and I don’t begrudge you for that, hell, I am sucker for nostalgia too, but when it’s used in such a lazy way, it’s indefensible. Particularly as it means the new cast members, some of which are very good, and their characters, are completely overshadowed by what is often, a messy sown together film. An unstructured story doesn’t help anyone, but the biggest culprit for this comes from the editing room. I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is all over the place, stop-starting constantly, and it creates a ton of threads that have to be haphazardly tied up before things can fully end. It is staggering that this is what we get for 111 minutes of our time, and it really makes you wonder what the original cut looked like.

Or maybe it doesn’t. I’m not asking for a longer version of this film. I barely got through what we have here. Maybe you need to be a I Know What You Did Last Summer superfan to really enjoy this, but does such a thing exist? This isn’t Halloween, or Scream, or The Exorcist. I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) is a bad film, partially because of the uninteresting story, egregious length, and bad editing job, but mainly because of the total lack of effort put in to do anything fresh or interesting.

Nostalgia rules, eh?