There’s a strong nostalgic vibe running through this latest ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ instalment, which reunites key characters from the 1997 original. Set once again in Southport, North Carolina, the film revisits the familiar premise: a group of characters accidentally kill someone late at night on a desolate road, only to start receiving ominous notes from someone who knows what they did last summer. One by one, in typical slasher fashion, they begin to get picked off.

It’s fascinating to watch actors who were in their twenties when the original was released, now nearing fifty, still emotionally shackled by the trauma of events that happened nearly 30 years ago. The film plays both as a homage to the teen horror classics of the late ’90s and as a self-aware commentary on the pull of nostalgia. In fact, Jennifer Love Hewitt delivers a particularly telling line: ‘Nostalgia is overrated.’ That moment lands well, hinting at a deeper reflection on why we return to these kinds of stories.

There are shades here of ‘Flatliners’ too, with characters who are cocky and self-assured, yet dimly aware that fate might not be so easily outwitted. The theme of atonement is touched upon, though often only on a superficial level. Just when we think we have figured out who the killer is, the film throws in a late twist, forcing us to reassess at least one character’s entire arc. It’s a clever turn, even if it arrives a little too late to fully redeem the narrative.

One of the film’s disappointments, however, is that the returning characters – despite all their talk about the past – feel strangely interchangeable. There’s a sense that the film is paying lip service to trauma rather than exploring it meaningfully. Meanwhile, the new generation of teens is basically repeating the same mistakes their parents did back in 1997, which adds to the déjà vu without deepening the emotional or thematic layers.

Conceptually, it’s a bit thin. While the original always lived in the shadow of Wes Craven’s ‘Scream’, which has also seen a recent reboot, this version goes through the motions without much spark. It gestures toward weighty themes, like how communities avoid reckoning with their past, but fails to say anything new. For example, there’s no mention of how the seaside town has changed – no exploration of gentrification or class shifts. It’s as if the filmmakers had all the right ingredients, but weren’t willing to dig deeper.

Ultimately, the film seems to argue that you can’t escape the past. But ironically, it refuses to confront that very idea with any real conviction. It wants to revisit familiar ground, but not challenge it, leaving us with a movie that says the right things… but doesn’t quite do them.