I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (2025)

This sequel to the 1997 slasher has real craft in it. It builds suspense by refusing to always play the obvious jump-scare card, it has genuine humor, and it understands that a hit-and-run cover-up can haunt people for decades. Returning stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr. give it legacy weight, and the screening audience audibly cheered a cameo from the original film.

But craft isn't the whole verdict. The story is also crowded — too much happening, a resolution that doesn't quite land — and it's soaked in very strong violence (harpoons, meat hooks, a stabbing in a church sanctuary), abundant f-words, and sexual content including a partially depicted bedroom scene and a same-sex kissing scene.

The moral compass here — characters trying to stop a killer — is real but thin, and it's outweighed by everything piled on top of it. This one isn't worth your time or your conscience.

On July Fourth in a small coastal town, a group of friends accidentally causes a driver to plunge off a cliff — and instead of reporting it, they cover it up. Nearly a year later, an anonymous note arrives: "I know what you did last summer." One of them turns to a woman who survived a nearly identical nightmare 28 years earlier. The past, it turns out, doesn't stay buried.

Three stars means this is a well-made entry in a tired genre, not a great film outright. The director gets real mileage out of subverting jump-scare expectations, and there's a vein of dark humor running through the mayhem that keeps things from feeling rote. The film also lands a genuine idea — that trauma doesn't stay in the past — and the cast, mixing rising talent with returning franchise leads, earns a crowd reaction at a key cameo.

Where it falters is structure. The source notes "almost too much happening" and a final resolution that "could be better structured." It's a movie with good instincts and a cluttered script, entertaining in the moment but not fully in control of its own story.

The film's moral core is thin but present: the main characters spend the movie trying to stop a killer and save lives, which is more than nothing. But that's nearly the only virtue on display. Outside of survival mode, these characters are morally adrift — casual and constant profanity, a same-sex kissing relationship treated as unremarkable, and a scene of an engaged woman climbing into bed with her ex-fiancé within days of her fiancé's murder. The film doesn't moralize against any of this; it simply presents it as how young adults live now.

The one idea worth taking seriously is the film's engine: a group of people hides a wrong instead of confessing it, and the hiding costs them everything years later. That's a true thing about sin and cover-up, even if the movie never frames it in those terms. Scripture says it plainly: "be sure your sin will find you out" (Numbers 32:23). The gospel offers a better way through guilt than running from it for decades — confession, not concealment, is the road to peace.

There's real skill in this slasher revival — smart pacing tricks, a genuine idea about buried guilt, and a cast that earns its nostalgia. But the film drowns its own good instincts in graphic violence, constant profanity, and sexual content that has no place in a family's — or most adults' — movie night. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something better this week? Start here:.