July 16, 2025
by Carla Hay
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” (2025)
Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Culture Representation: Taking place in 2024 and 2025, in the fictional Southport, North Carolina, the horror film “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (based on the novel of the same name) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and multi-racial people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A group of former high school friends are targeted by a serial killer who’s dressed as a hat-wearing, masked fisherman and who knows about the friends’ secret manslaughter involvement in the accidental car death of a young man.
Culture Audience: “I Know What You Did Last Summer” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” franchise, and horror sequels that rely too heavily on nostalgia for earlier movies in the series.
The 2025 version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is one of several horror movie franchises (such as “Scream,” “Saw,” “The Exorcist” and “The Strangers”) that have been revived in the 2020s, in order to attract new generations of fans. The 2025 version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is an example of a franchise movie that goes overboard in fan-service nostalgia instead of building a creative new path. There are some plot holes, and the murder mystery is easy to solve when the body count increases. Most horror fans will find something to like about this reboot/sequel, but it’s not enough to save a movie that’s full of recycled ideas and unanswered questions.
Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” was co-written by Sam Lansky and Robinson. The movie is based on Lois Duncan’s classic 1973 young-adult novel of the same name. The book was adapted into the 1997 horror film “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which spawned the dreadful 1998 sequel “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.” The 2006 film “I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer” was released direct-to-video and had none of the characters (except for the Fisherman serial killer) that were in the first two “Last Summer” movies. There was also the 2021 short-lived Prime Video series “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which flopped with critics and audiences.
The 2025 movie version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” brings back at least two of the characters from the 1990s movies. In 2025’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” the ages have increased for the group of friends who made a pact to secretly cover up being involved in a man’s accidental death. In the 1990s movies (and in the original novel), the friends are teenagers in high school and then in college. In the 2025 version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” the friends are in their mid-20s, although some of them still act like teenagers in high school.
The movie begins on July 4, 2024, when Ava Brucks (played by Chase Sui Wonders) has arrived back in her hometown of Southport, North Carolina. Southport was the location of 1997’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” but this beach city has been transformed since the 1990s, due to gentrification. The formerly middle-class Southport is now an enclave to many affluent residents. In the movie, one of the characters describes Southport as “the Hamptons of the South.” (The 2025 movie version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” was actually filmed in New South Wales, Australia.)
Ava (who graduated from high school in 2017) is among the people who grew up in a life of privilege in Southport. She’s also from a generation who wasn’t even born when the first wave of serial killings happened in Southport. Ava has come back to visit Southport to attend the Fourth of July engagement party of Danica Richards (played by Madelyn Cline), who was Ava’s best friend in high school.
Ava and Danica grew apart after they graduated from high school. They haven’t seen or spoken to each other in a few years because Ava stopped returning Danica’s calls and messages. Danica is engaged to marry Teddy Spencer (played by Tyriq Withers), who is the spoiled son of wealthy and powerful real-estate developer Grant Spencer (played by Billy Campbell) and his socialite wife Jill Spencer (played by Simone Annan), who is seen very briefly in the beginning of the film. Grant has a reputation for being the main reason why Southport has gentrified.
Also invited to this engagement party is someone whom Ava is somewhat nervous to see: Teddy’s best friend Milo Griffin (played by Jonah Hauer-King), who has a generic personality and who works in Washington, D.C., in some type of political job. Ava and Milo had a vague romantic attraction in high school. It seems like if Ava and Milo were ever a “couple,” it wasn’t a serious relationship, and it didn’t last. The point is that Ava and Milo are supposed to have sexual tension when they see each other again all these years later.
One of the biggest flaws in this version of “I Know You Did Last Summer” is that Ava unrealistically never mentions any of her family members when going back to her hometown. She’s seen getting dressed for the engagement party in a bedroom that is decorated the same way that she had it decorated in high school, which suggests that she’s in her former childhood bedroom. Her parents or other relatives (if she has any) are nowhere to be seen in the movie.
Ava is obviously supposed to be the movie’s main protagonist, but hardly anything is revealed about her life before and after she moved away from Southport. She never talks what she does for a living. She has limited and very superficial conversations with Danica about their friendship in high school. Ava tells Danica that she’s sorry about cutting off contact, but that’s about as revealing as their conversations go in the movie.
Danica’s family members are also invisible/non-existent in the movie. It’s a bizarre and unexplainable omission for someone who’s planning to have a lavish “high society” wedding. Danica talks a lot about shallow things, but not once does she mention who her family is. Danica might as well have been plopped into the movie like she got lost on the way to a “Real Housewives” reality show audition.
As the enagement party ends that night, the four reunited pals (Ava, Danica, Teddy and Milo) decide to continue their tradition of watching Fourth of July fireworks from a cliffside view. Teddy is ready to get very drunk and stoned. He’s already tipsy on alcohol, and he’s got some marijuana that he smokes on the way there. Ava also indulges in some of the marijuana smoking.
Before they drive off, the four friends notice two workers from the restaurant/bar that catered the party: Stevie Ward (played by Sarah Pidgeon) and Hannah Decker (played by Georgia Flood) are busy packing up some supplies. Hannah is a member of Southport Trinity Church, which has a creepy and overly zealous leader named Pastor Judah (played by Austin Nichols), who is introduced fairly late in the movie. Stevie is invited to join the four pals to watch the fireworks.
Why are Ava, Danica, Teddy and Milo interested in hanging out with Stevie? In dialogue that’s basically an exposition dump, it’s quickly explained that Stevie used to be a close friend of Ava, Danica, Teddy and Milo when they were in high school. However, Stevie’s life went downhill after her father was sent to prison for some type of fraud that caused her family’s finances to be ruined. Stevie developed an addiction that landed her in rehab while her former friends went away to college and seemed to forget all about Stevie.
Ava, Danica, Teddy and Milo feel some guilt about abandoning their friendship with Stevie at a low point in her life, which is why they invite her to watch fireworks with them. Stevie declines the offer at first because she says she has to finish working that night. But she is persuaded to join the group.
On a winding cliffside road, Teddy is drunk and stoned when he gets out of the car and starts acting like an idiot in the middle of the road. He narrowly avoids being hit by one car. A pickup truck drives up less than minute later and swerves to avoid hitting him. The truck crashes through a guardrail and is hanging over a steep cliff. The only person in the truck is the driver: a young man who’s barely conscious.
Ava, Danica, Teddy, Milo and Stevie panic about what to do as the car tilts precariously off the cliff. Anyone who goes inside the truck to try to pull out the driver could cause the truck to fall over the cliff. And then, the worst-case scenario happens: The truck falls over the cliff with the driver trapped inside. It’s a different scenario than the original “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which had a hit-and-run accident.
Teddy calls 911 to report seeing the truck go over the cliff, but he tells the others that he won’t tell authorities what caused the accident, and he insists that they all leave the scene of this manslaughter crime before police and anyone else sees them. Ava and Stevie are the only ones in the group who think they should wait for the police to arrive and tell the truth about everything that happened. Danica and Teddy (who don’t want their wedding to be ruined by this scandal) are the ones who feel strongest about keeping what happened a secret.
Eventually, all five of them make a pact to keep it a secret. However, Teddy later reveals that he told his father Grant, in case he needs Grant to help him get out of trouble. Grant has obvious motives to keep it a secret too. It’s revealed early on in the movie that the person in the car really did die because his body was found, and his death was in the local news. His name was Sam Cooper.
By changing the car accident from a hit-and-run to a victim’s car swerve gone wrong, 2025’s “I Know what You Did Last Summer” makes it more believable that this accident could be kept a secret because there was no damage done to the car that Teddy was driving. However, there are too many implausible things that happen in 2025’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer” that become even harder to accept once it’s revealed who’s behind the murders that happen in the movie. After this information is revealed, it makes law enforcement and some other people look incredibly stupid for not knowing about certain information that would be easily known and investigated in real life.
One year after the car accident, Danica is having another Fourth of July engagement party. This time, she’s engaged to marry another handsome and wealthy guy. His name is Wyatt (played by Joshua Orpin), and he’s addicted to alcohol, but Danica says that she’s willing to overlook Wyatt’s drinking problem because Wyatt treats her well. It’s mentioned that Danica broke up with Teddy because Teddy went on a downward spiral of abusing alcohol after the car accident. (Danica seems to have a thing for alcohol-abusing, rich pretty boys.)
And once again, Ava and Milo are at this engagement party. This time, Danica gets an anonymous greeting card that says, “I know what you did last summer.” At first, Danica accuses Teddy of sending the card because she thinks he’s jealous that she’s moved on to a new fiancé. Teddy (who is still a heavy drinker) vehemently denies it because he wants to keep their big secret too.
Someone who’s in town to do a story on the serial killings that have plagued Southport is a true crime podcaster named Tyler (played by Gabbriette Bechtel), who hosts a podcast called Live, Love, Slaughter. Tyler (who has a brash and crude personality) thinks she can uncover information that no one else has reported. Ava and Tyler met because they were on the same airplane flight. Tyler is first seen in the movie having a sexual hookup with Ava in an airport bathroom.
It’s another example of how disjointed the movie is, because even though it shows that Ava is queer or bisexual, the movie doesn’t reveal hardly anything else about her personal life. In another scene, Ava drops a major hint to Milo that she’s into BDSM sex, which makes straght-laced Milo very uncomfortable. All of this might be the movie’s way of being provocative, but it looks so phony, contrived and irrelevant to the main story.
After Danica gets the mystery greeting card, the killings begin. Just like in the other “Last Summer” movies, the masked killer is dressed in a fisherman’s hat and jacket and uses a fisherman’s hook to murder the victims. This killer is called the Fisherman.
One of the movie’s biggest failings is how easy it is to narrow down who the killer could be. The movie has very few characters who are tall enough and strong enough to do all the strenuous fighting and murders that take place between the Fisherman and the murder victims. And then, when you look at possible motives and who’s still alive in the last 20 minutes of the film, it becomes even easier to figure out who committed the murders.
Two of the characters from 1997’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer” make their return in the 2025 version of the movie: Julie James (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (played by Freddie Prinze Jr.), who were a dating couple in high school. Julie and Ray are now a divorced couple who can’t stand each other. Julie works as a criminology professor at a local university. Ray owns Ray’s Bar, where Stevie and Hannah work.
Aside from not having enough possible suspects, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” has a big problem with how the screenplay overlooks or omits many things that should be in a believable slasher movie. The movie has no significant law enforcement presence that’s investigating these murders. That doesn’t mean police detectives had to be the main characters, but the movie needed to show at least one law enforcement official consistently interacting with any witnesses and anyone who was close to the murder victims.
Police officers are briefly seen but are mostly background characters. Danica has a scene where she’s alone in a police interview room, but that scene is mostly a setup for a nostalgia-oriented “surprise.” The “surprise” doesn’t last long and only serves as a reminder that 2025’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer” has a shortage of fresh new ideas for its characters.
When you factor in that the people being murdered in this movie mostly come from affluent and influential families, that’s when “I Know What You Did Last Summer” loses all credibility that law enforcement is almost non-existent in this film. Instead, the movie shows Ava unrealistically trying to solve the crimes on her own. A few of the murders happen and then are never mentioned again. The screenplay is just so sloppy and distracting with these plot holes.
The acting performances are serviceable, with Hewitt making the most out of her screen time. Prinze is a little stiff in his role, but his acting doesn’t ruin the movie. However, all the new characters are as hollow as hollow can be. The movie’s fan-service pandering reaches its peak at the end of the film (including a mid-credits scene), which makes it obvious that the filmmakers opened the door for a sequel.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” has satirical comedy and some homages to the franchise’s first two films. And the movie has some effective amusing moments when it pokes fun at how a privileged character like Danica can live in a bubble of materialistic vanity. But when you consider at how much information is on the Internet and on social media, it’s hard not to overlook how ridiculous it is that the motive for these murders wasn’t discovered very early on in whatever investigation took place.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” movies have never been about supernatural or paranormal killers. The killers in these movies are very much human. And that’s why 2025’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer” makes the egregious mistake of making it only about the grisly ways that people get killed and ignoring all of the things that make the victims seem like real people whose murders would be investigated.
Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems will release “I Know What You Did Last Summer” in U.S. cinemas on July 18, 2025.
