Coherence Gets the Hook in I Know What You Did Last Summer

Leave it to a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to highlight that there was never anything particularly interesting about I Know What You Did Last Summer in the first place. Unlike the sea change event of Scream a year earlier in 1996, which reinvigorated the genre with layers of winking meta-commentary, the original IKWYDLS was a much more conventional slasher affair, despite sharing screenwriter Kevin Williamson with Scream. Its mystery and revenge-based story could easily have fit in any early ‘80s golden age slasher, which makes perfect sense, given that Williamson was adapting from a 1973 novel. The newly reformulated IKWYDLS, meanwhile, arrives as exactly the sort of nostalgia-grubbing legacy sequel or “requel” that the surprisingly prescient 2022 Scream reboot satirized, only reinforcing the meager, unimaginative status of the IKWYDLS franchise in any kind of genre tier list. Despite having the gall to make Jennifer Love Hewitt at one point announce that “nostalgia is overrated,” nearly two hours into a film that heavily relies on fond viewer memories of both the original IKWYDLS and its 1998 sequel, what stands out the most about the new film is ultimately just how nonsensical it’s so frequently capable of being.

Roughly 28 years have passed since the original spate of Fisherman slayings in the small North Carolina seaside town of Southport, and the town has subsequently been reimagined with a decidedly whiter collar. Gone is the grimy fishing industry; Southport has somehow revamped itself into the Hamptons of the South, with a bustling tourism industry and all the attending signifiers (Aperol spritzes and towers of pastel macarons) that go along with obnoxious wealth. Five high school friends (Danica, Ava, Milo, Teddy and Stevie) reunite in this setting to celebrate the impending wedding of Dani (Madelyn Cline, of Glass Onion) and Teddy (Tyriq Withers), who celebrate their upcoming nuptials with a banner that reads “Dani and Teddy get hooked”–a perfectly normal way to describe a wedding, and not at all a painfully forced play on words. Naturally, it’s not long before the quintet has played witness to a terrible accident, which they decide to sweep under the rug. And would you believe that a year later, a mysterious figure in the Fisherman’s slicker starts killing them off one by one, seeking revenge?

It’s the initial transgression that ultimately communicates to the audience just how difficult much of I Know What You Did Last Summer will be to accept. Unlike the original, which presented a scenario where the group of protagonist college students were undeniably at fault, forced to take an active hand in murder and a cover-up, the kids of this IKWYDLS have, quite frankly, barely transgressed in the first place. Most of their problems could be solved by simply telling the police precisely what happened, leaving them with little to any culpability. And once the killer starts showing up and shoving his fish hook through necks and sternums, most of their problems could again be solved by our characters having bothered to do the barest amount of research into the person who had been killed a year earlier. A modicum of curiosity would have quickly pointed them in the direction of the killer, which forces the audience to perceive our protagonists as almost unbearably stupid.

And that’s a shame, because those members of the group who are afforded the chance to flesh themselves out by this perplexing screenplay do display some good chemistry with each other. Cline and Withers are surprisingly sweet at times, with Withers steadily turning a brainless jock archetype into a significantly more sympathetic, dimensional character. Cline displays a knack for humor, often at her own expense, given Danica’s exemplification of irritating Gen Z archetypes, such as her simultaneous embrace of shallow pop psychology and woo-woo new age/astrological psychobabble. She makes an effective tandem with the more underwritten and wishy-washy Ava (Chase Sui Wonders, of Bodies Bodies Bodies), who at times seems like she’s meant to be the main character or Final Girl of IKWYDLS, but is ultimately let down by a screenplay that has her do things like say “I miss you” to a photo of a dead mother, and then never mention that character again. Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), meanwhile, are both clearly lower tier characters in terms of the screenplay’s interest, and neither comes into focus, even with third act revelations.