Nothing is thrown away from the nineties. After all, it is the decade that in that cyclical eternal return of fashions, tendencies and aesthetics is now referring to our daily head. Here then is the turn to shine at the cinema for “I know what you did”, coming out in theaters on July 16 with Eagle Pictures.

Call it reboot, call it revival, call it Legacy Sequel (the latter expression that the good ones like). Jennifer Kaytin Robinson directs a new chapter – technically the fourth, but the third is “expelled” from the canon – of that saga that between 1997 and 1998 did very well at the box office. A horror that together with Scream, released in 1996, revitalized the slasher, a cinematographic genre that went largest in the eighties with a mysterious killer in the center and a pile of young people killed along the way.

What is the new one know what you did

In short, courses and appeals. The cinema is made of this and this in particular is made a lot of US commercial cinema, which in the past of the old fishing successes and damn. And I know what you did, who had already had a serial adaptation on first video in 2021, presents the structure common to all these operations: retracing in the footsteps of what was with a mixture of metharration and open nostalgia.

The initial pretext is to do it by passing through the door of Millennial culture, embarking with great shyness an recapitulary what was through the manias and obsessions of consumption of the present, putting for example in the middle podcast and True Crime. It is one of the many ideas with which Robinson’s script and Sam Lansky does not know what to do, like the intuition (perhaps the most interesting) that in the world of the film there is no trace of the massacres that took place in the town of Southoport in 1997 because it made it deleted for economic interests and revised only through this sort of imagination between collective memory and fanaticism.

This is how the new group of protagonists (chase on the Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon), involved in an accident similar to that of the original film, dates back to the modus operandi of the killer who made fury and terror almost thirty years ago. And that’s how I know what you did to try to establish with doing too winking and insisted that game between inside and outside the shirts of the film. How to re-establish relationships with the original surviving protagonists (Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddy Prinze Jr.) and choose them as mentors, scheme now from practices of these post -lasher: Halloween, the same screen, Final Destination.

An irritating and that does not work

Out of this effort I know what you did get hurry. It is good to be at the game, but between silly characters and pretext narrative sidetracks it is difficult to abandon yourself to a grammar of the story that thinks you can use a certain way of exposing and announcing things as it has been done for 50 years. Clichés such as dividing itself in the face of danger or ignoring obvious signals do neither tribute nor work in the fence of the genre, but constitute the idiocy of an agglomeration of inequalities that pretends not to take into account new taste and sensitivity.

The irritating is around the corner because then Robinson’s film believes he can leverage the solid legacy of a work that, net of the merits already mentioned, was a basis for a little more than a nonsense in turn ratop on the stylistic features of what had preceded it. Without, so to speak, reflections such as the reflective self -irony proper to a screen.

I know what you did then have a language of horror and the eviscerato slasher of its components of tension and disgust to make room for easy and demodé tools, such as the artificial thrill of the Jumpsca. A very abused expedient, in itself not without dignity but used here in the laziest way possible between sudden assembly tears and volume raised to the maximum – on the consistency of the sound of the steps exploited to qualify a character there would be a separate chapter to be opened. Nothing remains at the image, just as nothing remains at the game of the puzzle, canceled by the punctual final explains with which to hook even the most distracted viewer. We deserve better. And the inevitable post credit scenes can’t let us abandon him at all.

Rating: 4.5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-3uch0mgkq