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, a hunch proven in the subsequent 90 minutes.
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 notorious serial killer named Heart Eyes, responsible for killing scores of couples nationwide just before Valentine’s Day each year, apparently setting his 2025 sights on Seattle. Can the pair fall in love fast enough to want to save each other from the killer who seems to be trailing their every move? And can either be trusted? As in every modern romantic comedy, it’s never a question of whether they’ll fall in love or whether numerous obstacles will derail them on the way to the realization that they belong together. But in Heart Eyes, the romance de-railing is the killer, who keeps leaping from closets and merry-go-rounds and dark corners every ten minutes or so.
It’s hard to take a movie seriously that skirts borderline camp, 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, laughably 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 remotely effective, but there isn’t much tension and both the audience, and film, seem to lose interest in the identity of the culprit long before the climactic reveal, which is ludicrous. It’s telling that Ruben ends the 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 by a creepy slasher.
The performances range from acceptably plucky (Holt) to acceptably handsome (Gooding) to broadly cartoonish (Watkins, and Gigi Zumbado as the requisite best galpal). And in the film’s climax, the actor playing the killer has a solid confessional moment, wildly silly as it may be.
Heart Eyes would have worked better, as many a modern slasher film would, 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 is merely table stakes and a meta-level plot must be layered atop the basic human fears and fight for survival (which are plenty enough for any horror picture). This time, the genre-bending dilutes the horror.
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.
1 1/2 stars
