HEART EYES - Mark Reviews Movies

Heart Eyes, Screen Gems

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 6, 2025

It's difficult enough for filmmakers to work successfully within an overly familiar genre. Heart Eyes sets up an even tougher task: to work within two of them. It's a slasher movie, with a masked killer stalking and stabbing—and doing some other things to—several inevitable victims. The murderer here works exclusively on Valentine's Day, however, and that leads us to the other aim of director Josh Ruben's genre mashup. It also tries to be a romantic comedy.

The blending of these two, very distinct modes is theoretically fascinating and inherently amusing, especially because the director and the trio of screenwriters—Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy—keep the material's tongue firmly planted in its cheek. That's the case from the start, with a typical horror-movie prologue that gives us a couple of anonymous soon-to-be victims and tries to prove to us that the killer—and, by extension, the filmmakers—means business.

This introduction is played as a cruelly humorous gag, as a social-media-savvy couple's staged marriage proposal is violently interrupted by someone in a mask. It's a serial murderer who will come be known as the Heart Eyes Killer, given the villain's creepy mask, which is leathery thing accentuated by a pair of heart-shaped goggles.

Heart Eyes doesn't just have a knife, by the way. The killer also wields a crossbow with retractable bolts that suggests a demented Cupid. Heart Eyes mainly targets romantic couples, but that won't stop the murderer from slashing anyone who gets in the way, such as the photographer whom the couple has hired to capture their "spontaneous" moment. One of them ends up with an arrow in the head, and the other probably should have paid a bit more attention to her surroundings before picking a particular hiding spot at a winery.

On the surface, everything here is pretty straightforward, and that includes the odd shift that follows the prologue. We meet Ally (Olivia Holt), who works on the marketing team of a jewelry company and recently broke up with a boyfriend who has moved on very quickly. She's cynical of love in general and especially on this Valentine's Day, and right away, the filmmakers boldly announce that the movie's storytelling priorities have shifted a bit.

Ally has an old-fashioned meet-cute at a coffee shop with Jay (Mason Gooding), when the two discover they have the same order and awkwardly bump heads twice. There's some contrived business, of course, including Ally also discovering that Jay, a freelance marketing expert, has been called in to correct an oversight on her recent advertising campaign. As it turns out, people don't appreciate an ad featuring famous doomed couples being launched on the same day that everyone is terrified of a masked serial killer who hunts romantic partners.

The ultimate setup here is admittedly clever. In a romantic comedy, this series of chance meetings and resulting misunderstandings would lead to characters like the skeptical Ally and the hopelessly romantic Jay to fall hard for each other. In this one, the big misunderstanding is that Heart Eyes spots the two on a business dinner, assumes they're a couple (She pretends they are dating when she spots her ex), and starts hunting them.

From there, though, the horror and thriller elements of the story take precedence over the romantic-comedy ones. The plot becomes an extended chase, a string of brutal killings, and the pair trying to stop and learn the identity of Heart Eyes in the movie's preferred mode of operation.

As such, it's a fine and occasionally fun exercise in horror, with a series of in-jokes (a pair of detectives, played by Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa, who don't realize they share names with characters from a big-budget movie franchise), some well-staged suspense sequences (games of cat-and-mouse in a darkened police station and at a pop-up drive-in—a "buffet of killing" for Heart Eyes, Ally notes), and a couple of bloodily nasty deaths. If the movie simply behaved as a to-the-point but self-aware horror tale, it might have succeeded in exactly that way.

Instead, the filmmakers' ambitious genre-mashing gets in the way. There are flashes here and there of some clichés, including one indirect gag about Ally being the stereotypically klutzy rom-com leading lady when she attempts a dramatic entrance through a broken window. The rest of the movie's interest in that genre mode depends on our willingness to search for signs of it, apparently. When the screenplay eventually remembers it's trying to be two things at once, the whole affair comes to a stop, most notably during a scene in which Ally and Jay have a heartfelt conversation about why their respective opinions on love are the way they are.

That moment is played so seriously (apart from a joke about a randy couple in close proximity) that it stands as a stark contrast to the rest of the material. It's also clear evidence of why this genre-blending experiment isn't nearly as simple as the filmmakers seem to believe it could be.

The gulf between what we expect from a horror movie and from a romantic comedy is deep and wide. Even with the joking tone of the slasher elements within Heart Eyes, the movie never finds a way to bridge that gap. The filmmakers' obvious fondness for one mode over the other keep the result feeling like very separate ideas unconvincingly smashed together.

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