At The Movies: I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t hook, Sharp Corner is a slow burn

I Know What You Did Last Summer (M18)

111 minutes, opens on July 31

★★☆☆☆

The story: Five friends are stalked by a killer a year after they caused a fatal car accident and conspired to cover up their involvement.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is best understood by first remembering what the high-school grads in the 1997 movie of the same title did 27 summers earlier, which was to inspire a Hollywood horror franchise with their bad decision to conceal a hit-and-run.

This feature fourquel remake-update returns to the fictional North Carolina fishing town of Southport. Another generation of cavorting juveniles has again cost a driver his life, and a hooded vigilante is chasing down the four rich twits (Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King and Tyriq Withers) and their working-class pal (Sarah Pidgeon) to harpoon them with his fishing hook.

Pretty faces and privilege cannot save them. Their only hope is to seek help from the two millennial idol survivors of the original massacre.

Freddie Prinze Jr’s Ray Bronson advises them against fleeing to the Bahamas. If his reference to the 1998 sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is not sufficiently self-reflexive, there is Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Julie James demanding: “What did you do last summer?”

American writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge, 2022) winks at the film series and its slasher genre formula as the terrified victims continually run into dead ends and locked doors. How dumb such tropes have come to be, nearly five decades after their introduction in Halloween (1978).

But the movie offers neither reinvention nor ingenious kills. The intrigue of the bogeyman’s identity aside, it is a jokey bloodbath consequently just as dumb, although rarely dull.

Hot take: Self-aware humour is the feeble hook for a 1990s teen-scream revival.

Sharp Corner (M18)

111 minutes, opens on July 31

★★★☆☆

The story: Family man Josh (Ben Foster) moves into a woodland residence with his wife Rachel (Cobie Smulders) and young son (William Kosovic), and becomes fixated on the auto collisions recurring outside their front yard.

The first time a car skids by, sending a tyre crashing through the window on the couple’s first night in their new dream house, they dismiss the traumatic experience as a freak incident. But soon, another vehicle crashes, then another.

The Canadian-Irish co-production Sharp Corner is not an episode of sci-fi TV series The Twilight Zone (1959 to 2020). A sharp road corner is the logical explanation for the fatalities.

The property filmed in Nova Scotia sits at a blind spot, and Canadian writer-director Jason Buxton’s (Blackbird, 2012) adaptation of a Russell Wangersky short story is a psychological thriller about Josh himself going round the bend, so to speak, in his spiralling obsession to save future victims.

Only by being a hero can he prove his manhood, he believes.

What is he, after all, except an unmotivated IT project manager with a paunch and a balding pate, married to a capable, attractive psychotherapist?

American actor Foster, long a hair-trigger presence in crime dramas like Alpha Dog (2006) and Hell Or High Water (2016), delivers an uncharacteristically internalised performance of existential unease in a disquieting study of masculine insecurity.

In his search for purpose, Josh begins to furtively miss work for first aid training. More and more it consumes his life, until he loses everything and is left alone at home just waiting and hoping for – and eventually orchestrating – the next accident.

Hot take: Such are the calamitous consequences of bad fengshui.