‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ still really wants to be ‘Scream’

The fictitious North Carolina fishing town has been given a Hamptons-like makeover, with its murderous past swept under the rug by rich business tycoons, and the series’ familiar locations replaced by splashy new businesses. On the surface, it’s a remarkable followup to the original’s half-baked themes of class, via rich-and-poor characters alike thrown into turmoil by a vengeful killer. However, this veneer ends up equally flimsy, as the film isn’t really concerned with, well, anything beyond harkening back to its urtext. In most decades-later sequels, an original film is gospel, and deviations from it tend to be winks at the audience, as is the case with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s reboot.

Where the original cast once ran over a man on a mountainside on the Fourth of July, the 2025 movie sets up a similar premise, but has its new set of teenagers—Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danicah (Madelyn Cline), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon)—almost get run over themselves, before failing to stop a pickup truck and its driver from tipping over a cliff. It doesn’t have nearly the same “oomph” of guilt and culpability, but it similarly drives the five pals apart over the next year, when they reconvene for the holiday, and things start going awry.

The plot of the new "I Know What You Did Last Summer" involves a pickup truck driving over a cliff.

Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

Anonymous threatening notes to the fab five claiming to “know what [they] did last summer” soon lead to real-life murders, as is often the case in these. Protagonist Ava is—apart from her queerness and being mixed race—a mostly nondescript girl with little depth or character, whose dead mother is mentioned (à la Scream’s protagonist, where it’s a much bigger deal), but whose grief has little to do with the actual story. Rich girl Danicah, on the other hand, is a firecracker of a character, a spoiled, white debutante who speaks in memes and cultish lifestyle shorthand, but whose apparent role as an annoying Gen Z send-up reveals surprisingly lovable layers. What binds both girls together is how much they suffer throughout the movie, and both Wonders and Cline give it their all, as “scream queens” in the making.

In the story’s margins are Milo, who’s hung up on Ava, but is similarly nondescript, as well as rich kid Teddy, whose father has the town’s police and politicians in his pockets. There isn’t much to these characters either, and while their fifth friend Stevie has the potential to be interesting—as the group’s only working class friend, introducing hints of an intriguing dynamic—she mostly serves as a bridge to the existing legacy characters, whose re-introduction is a reminder of just how much this series is a shadow of something better and more successful.

The original, written by Kevin Williamson, felt like a cheap cash-in on the Scream fad from a year earlier (which Williamson also wrote), and if it wasn’t clear then, it most certainly is now. Scream remains a satirical meta-series about the rules of horror cinema, with recent fifth and sixth entries that double down on the legacy-sequel-ness of it all, and out of the blue, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer seems to believe itself in the same vein, as returning characters speak of established “rules,” as though there were ever any logic to this series. But Julie James is no Sidney Prescott—Neve Campbell’s Scream protagonist, who lives with the trauma of witnessing murder—and Ray Bronson is no grizzled Dewey Riley (David Arquette), but the movie certainly tries.

Freddie Prinze Jr (center) returns as Ray Bronson in "I Know What You Did Last Summer."

Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

Had Robinson managed to imbue I Know What You Did Last Summer with simmering tension, or even gruesome delights, then its other faux pas might have been forgivable. However, its use of space and darkness is often too confusing, and too visually amateur, to craft real thrills, and the movie never takes full advantage of the many kooky, fisherman-themed weapons it introduces to the killer’s arsenal, like harpoons and diver cages. The screenplay, co-written by Robinson and Sam Lansky (from a story by Robinson and Leah McKendrick) has hints of meta-textual ideas that go nowhere, between its premise of a modern American town papering over its past, and a new character introduced as a true crime podcaster, whose fascination with the original’s events go nowhere.

In addition to all of this, I Know What You Did Last Summer also tries to sprinkle hints of corporately sanitized pop-feminism atop its story of survivorship. However, this only ever takes the form of banal, ripped-from-the-Twitter-thread-dialogue, culminating in a truly bizarre punchline that feels completely out of place, given the movie’s own revelations about its characters. Its gestures towards a “girl power” story are limp and cynical, and they come at the cost of anything resembling a real ethos—one that might have rendered the movie truly terrifying, or emotionally engaging. Instead, people die (or almost die) and it barely matters, and the moments of bloodshed are seldom creative enough to create visceral thrills. It’s an empty shell of a movie, and the only tradition it continues is this’ series inability to live up to its slasher peers.