Whether scrappy indie (Terrifier, Late Night with the Devil, Strange Darling), studio gloss (A Quiet Place: Day One) or awards prestige (The Substance, Noseratu), horror films almost always bank tremendous profits. Last year alone they bludgeoned near a billion dollars from moviegoers with a whopping estimated 173% return on investment (this against typically small budgets). And while fiercely allegiant fans faithfully show up for frights, quality mileage varies from cheap thrills to high art (and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference).
By now the American slasher film, which originated in the 1970s with seminal landmarks like Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1977), has been sequel-ed, copied, deconstructed, holiday-ed, satirized, reinvented, regurgitated, beloved and reviled more than any other screen genre, and despite modest intentions—to scare you or at least gross you out—it remains one of cinema’s most enduring staples, regardless of quality.
So a film like Heart Eyes, a Valentine-themed slasher pic about a killer with a murderous grudge against young lovers, doesn’t necessarily have to be “good” to both satisfy the die-hards and rake in piles of cash. And this seems likely, even though the movie—a gory amalgam of romantic comedy and horror—isn’t very accomplished. But really, how’s the killing?
The first question—was anyone asking for a romantic-comedy-slasher? While the film’s marketing suggests a straight killer thriller as opposed to a Gen Z date night periodically interrupted by a killer, the movie, directed by Josh Ruben from a screenplay by Phillip Murphy, Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon, tries to straddle the line between cute chemistry and savagery; the result is a movie needing less charm and more chills.
On the suspense front, Ruben uses Scream as a template, not in self-reverence but similar in tone and execution as a masked stalker with glowing, heart-shaped eyes (undeniably imposing and niftily designed) keeps popping up to dispatch happy V-day victims. In the picture’s open sequence, an Insta-friendly vineyard engagement photo shoot becomes an aria of gore as a bride-to-be is pulverized in a grape crushing machine. By lingering on the blood and gristle, right away we know Ruben is going after extreme gore in lieu of suspense.
Enter young Seattle (New Zealand doubles) marketing ace Ally (Olivia Holt), still pining after the boyfriend that got away and responsible for a huge ad campaign blunder causing her demonstrative boss (Mikela Watkins) to recruit hotshot east coast team member Jay (Mason Gooding) for damage control. The pair meet cute in a coffee shop before becoming formal rivals at the office, but it isn’t long before they arrange a work dinner, on Valentine’s Day no less, to sort out how they’ll collaborate.
Tension and sparks fly, but the biggest problem is the re-emergence of a notoriously elusive serial killer named Heart Eyes, responsible for murdering scores of couples just before Valentine’s Day each year. Can the pair fall in love fast enough to want to save each other from the killer trailing their every move? And can either be trusted? As in every modern romantic comedy, it’s never a question of whether they’ll overcome numerous obstacles threatening to derail them on the way to the realization that they belong together. But in Heart Eyes, the romance de-railing is a vicious killer leaping from closets and merry-go-rounds and dark corners of the frame to spice things up each time their chemistry lags.
It’s hard to take a movie seriously that skirts both borderline in-jokes and boredom, and the introduction of a pair of barely there police detectives played by Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa, who happen to be named Hobbs and Shaw (see also Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), combined with a tedious police station interrogation, healthy dose of red herrings, inept drive-in movie slaughter and the sort of trick climax that feels absolutely arbitrary don’t help. Ditto the contrived relationship at the film’s center. Gooding, while looking great, doesn’t fully convince as a dashing romantic lead and Holt, who has her moments, can’t quite carry the movie. All of this would be acceptable if the scares (it is a horror film, after all) were effective, but since there isn’t much tension the film seems to lose interest in the identity of the culprit long before its ludicrous climactic reveal. Consequently, the we follow suit.
Heart Eyes would have worked better by dispensing with the high concept of a budding romance against its killer backdrop. Why slasher films in the modern age insist upon straying from what made the genre so successful in its golden era—unsuspecting young people stalked in the dark, woods, at camp, etc.—is a mystery, and the point in 2025 seems to be that the slasher concept is merely the starting point for a meta-level plot to be layered atop the genre’s basic human fears, notably the dark and a fight for survival, which should be plenty enough to set an audience on edge. Genre-bending such a basic movie formula with unnecessary digressions dilutes its purpose.
The performances range from acceptably plucky (Holt) to acceptably charming (Gooding) to broadly cartoonish (Watkins, and Gigi Zumbado as the requisite best galpal). And in the film’s climax, the actor revealed to be the killer has a solid confessional moment, silly as it may be.
The bar is set pretty low for these kinds of films—SCARE US—but for Heart Eyes, that seems too tall an order. For a holiday horror that delivers the goods, stick with 1981’s My Bloody Valentine, perhaps the most polished of the scores of Halloween knock-offs and still a creepy Cupid chiller. This time, it’s telling that Ruben ends his film with a romantic clinch; he’s more interested in pretty young people in love than the reason we showed up—to be frightened silly.
1 1/2 stars
