For as long as there have been slasher movies– literally, since 1974’s Black Christmas, widely considered the genre’s dawning– there have been holiday-themed slasher movies. The reasoning is obvious; horror filmmakers love subverting ostensibly wholesome iconography, and with luck one might end up with a yearly tradition for those in the market for some gruesome counterprogramming. Indeed, you could fill your calendar with ghoulish holiday celebrations– Halloween, of course, but also Thankskilling and Christmas Evil and Bloody New Year, and on and on. Heart Eyes, the new feature from Scare Me’s Josh Ruben, is not the first Valentine’s Day slasher (see the lovably Canadian My Bloody Valentine and its 3D remake, as well as the 2001 post-Scream footnote Valentine), but it stakes its claim as the current date movie du jour for the Blumhouse set. Unfortunately, like a box of chocolates from Harry Warden, its guts are less appealing than its wrapping.
Like the previous films from co-writer Christopher Landon (director of Happy Death Day and Freaky), Heart Eyes puts a genre spin on a non-horror formula. Ally (former Disney Channel star Olivia Holt) is your standard-issue rom-com heroine, a beautiful-but-disheveled ad exec struggling with her career while obsessing over her ex’s Instagram feed. When her big Valentine’s Day campaign (featuring dubiously tasteful imagery of such doomed lovers as Bonnie and Clyde and Titanic’s Jack and Rose) draws the ire of social media, she’s begrudgingly paired up with Jay (rising scream-king Mason Gooding), a high-powered spin doctor– who of course is also the impossibly charming young man she met-cute at the cafe earlier that day. Ally angrily agrees to hash out the campaign over a work dinner which she swears isn’t a date, despite Jay’s absurdly charismatic grin and litany of Mr. Right green flags. Oh, and also the city is being stalked by the Heart Eyes Killer, a notorious masked slasher who targets obnoxiously loving couples on Valentine’s Day. One thing leads to another, and soon our central not-a-couple are fighting for their lives just as they fight the inevitability of their will-they-won’t-they relationship.
Heart Eyes is at its best when it leans into the incongruity of its dueling genres. When Ally and Jay bump into Ally’s ex and his new GF, for example, he blithely admits that they were supposed to be on a double date, but their partners had the misfortune of being slaughtered by Heart Eyes (they kept the reservation, of course). Later, when Ally berates Jay for not defending her against the killer, he hisses back “These muscles weren’t made for violence! They were made for cuddling!” Ruben has a knack for exaggerating the conventions of the romantic comedy just into the range of the absurd, and he plays with the tropes with loving glee.
Unfortunately, Heart Eyes is a better rom-com parody than it is a slasher parody. There is a plastic sheen which undercuts the horror scenes, a sense that the filmmakers were so pleased with the big picture that they skipped the lurid invention which makes even a straightfaced slasher flick such a delightfully guilty pleasure. A pre-credits set piece in which an excruciatingly IG-perfect couple is fed into the presses at their winery-set engagement photo shoot should be wicked fun, but it plays as oddly lifeless, as if it had been sent through a filter itself. The same is true throughout the rest of the picture: news broadcasts about the Heart Eyes murders are over-the-top without ever quite landing on satirical, and even our heroes’ climactic struggles against the killer feel weightless. Heart Eyes markets itself as a date movie for gorehounds, but it plays instead like a horror movie made for people without much interest in the genre.
The smart move here would have been to play the first act rom-com straight before zagging into horror territory, to set the film up as a cozy Hallmark lovefest with only passing references to the lurking danger before dropping its unwitting characters into a far more inhospitable genre. Unfortunately, Heart Eyes seems to suffer from an addled attention span, jumping from horror to romance with little tonal distinction. Or maybe it assumes that its viewers’ attention spans are shot, lazily ambling from plot point to plot point while throwing out a big punchline or a blaring musical cue every few minutes to snap their eyes back from their phone. This is perhaps not an unreasonable assumption, given the film’s inevitable second life as a V-Day streaming pick, but in a theater it feels listless and off-putting.
I always feel a little guilty knocking a film like Heart Eyes. Taken on its own terms, it’s a likable enough bit of pop-horror fluff. Holt and Gooding are immensely charming as the romantic leads, and Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster are clearly having a great time as hard-nosed detectives Hobbs and Shaw (“Oh, like the movie.” “What movie?”). And the film is so eager to please that it does inevitably hit upon some very funny gags (in the inevitable glamming up montage prior to her “date,” Ally’s standard-issue best friend jeers, “You look like a before picture!”). But Heart Eyes ultimately falls flat compared to the great horror comedies of years past– or even Companion, in theaters as we speak, which is both funnier and unafraid to put some real bite into both the horror and romance sides of its equation. In the end, Heart Eyes is a little bit like a chocolate heart from Walgreens: it’ll do in a pinch, but it’s hollow and flaky, and a far cry from the real thing.
Heart Eyes
2025
dir. Josh Ruben
97 min.
Opens Friday, 2/7 @ Apple Cinemas Cambridge, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all local AMCs
