HEART EYES [2025]

Heart Eyes (2025)
Directed by: Josh Ruben
Written by: Christopher Landon, Josh Ruben, Michael Kennedy
Starring: Gigi Zumbado, Mason Gooding, Michaela Watkins, Olivia Holt

USA

IN CINEMAS NOW

RUNNING TIME: 97 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

There’s a killer on the loose, and he pops up in cities every Valentine’s Day to murder some couples. Now he’s in Seattle, where Ally McCabe is struggling with her ex-boyfriend having already got himself a new girlfriend. She works in marketing for a jewelry company, but when she screws up a marketing campaign, totally misjudging how people might react to jokey references to the “Heart Eyes Killer”, she enrages her boss Crystal Cane, who threatens her with the sack and calls in hotshot young marketing maestro Jay Simmons – who just happens to be the same guy she met in a coffee shop creating instant  attraction. Jay offers her a work date on Valentine’s Day, and Ally tries to resist temptation, but her first public display of affection is seen by the Heart Eyes Killer, who now makes the pair his prime target….

The first trailer of Companion suggested a film that would nicely subvert Valentine’s Day slush, but it actually turned out to be something rather different. So does Heart Eyes, which melds the slasher movie with the rom-com, do any better in this regard? Well, I’m sure that it’s a solid antidote to the new Bridget Jones, though isn’t anything? Mind you, if I was truly dedicated to the cause I’d to and see the latter anyway, seeing as it’s probably truly horrific. But I digress. The slasher movie and the rom-com seem like the oddest bedfellows, though they could probably coexist in a sharp and clever product. This isn’t that product, though it is a fairly fun movie. My heart sank a bit when the name of Christopher Landon came up in the credits as writer and producer. He’s certainly found his niche in recent years as a writer or co-writer of director of horror comedies, but so far none of his work has really succeeded in combining terror with humour. The great horror comedies don’t let the hunour weaken the horror and sometimes even let it add to it. Landon’s big hit was Happy Death Day, which had a good gimmick and some good ideas in with the bad ones but was seriously weakened by cack-handed storytelling and serious muting of the fear element. Heart Eyes has distinct similarities to that movie, but was its premise ever a good idea in the first place? Well it might have been if the end product was, as I said earlier, sharp and clever. There’s some parodying, but for a lot of the time the film does little except alternate light romance with kills without putting much of a spin on either. On that level, it does sorts work, and, unlike Happy Death Day and its extremely messy sequel, isn’t hamstrung by having to work within a ‘PG-13’ rating. The result is a film which does have its pleasures but which is a considerable disappointment from the director of Werewolves Within [I must review that].

It certainly begins well, giving the impression that we’re really going to get a thrilling slasher with a bit of subversiveness. We see a marriage proposal in a field, the dialogue rather forced until we realise that the couple is being filmed for the benefit of their social media audience. The man is arrogant and has a go at the photographer, but far worse is about to happen to the latter when he gets a machete in the face. Next, the groom gets an arrow in the chest. The bride flees for her life, pursued into a factory by the killer. This is all good slash stuff, Landon certainly now a dab hand at filming these kinds of scenes. Eventually the woman hides inside a machine which the killer turns on and she’s crushed to death. It seems that this is only the latest in a string of killings of couples on Valentine’s Day. It’s quite a neat notion, one which certainly differentiates this film enough from the two versions of My Bloody Valentine and Valentine to properly justify its existence. The police turn up and we get the usual banter between the main man and the main woman involved. She shows him a picture of a guy on a dating app she claims she’s going to be with even though he doesn’t know her, and he thinks she should go for someone macho – like him of course! And in case that isn’t funny enough for you, they’re called Zeke Hobbes and Jeanette Shaw – Hobbs and Shaw – and are well aware of how weird this is, and – even better – the lady is played by Jordana Brewster who’s been in some of the Fast And Furious movies, though supposedly she was cast way after the script had been written. She gives a solid performance, to be fair.

We now meet Ally, who has a “meet cute” with a man in a coffee shop. The fact that she orders a particular type of coffee begins the chat, then they accidentally bump their heads together not once but twice, leaving the guy with a bloody nose [well it wouldn’t be the woman, would it?]. The most amusing thing to me was that last week we had a similar mocking of this convention in Companion, though that one worked better as both a micky take and an actual device to get our couple to meet. At work, Ally shows her new advertisement for the jewelry company she works for, and her audience is appalled by all these couples, one of whom looks like Bonnie and Clyde, being killed. This darkly funny scene suggests a more twisted kind of comedic offering than we actually get, which is a real shame. Present in the room is the same guy she met earlier, and he’s actually a famed designer named Jay Simmons. Her Boss Crystal orders her to work with him before she’s fired, and Jay suggests they have dinner that night to gain inspiration, though Ally is distinctly unsure about this. After all, it is Valentine’s Day evening. The dialogue concerning this isn’t bad, but there’s something seriously missing here – we don’t feel the energy between these two. Ally eventually agrees and her best friend Monica helps her pick out an outfit. Monica’s the typical best friend type. sassy and fun-loving, but not written strongly enough to come across as either parodic or real. Ally and Jay meet at the restaurant, but the conversation gets heated when they question each other’s status and backstories. Jay leaves, and Ally follows, then – seen by Heart Eyes –  suddenly kisses Jay when she sees her previous boyfriend whom she hasn’t got over with his new girlfriend. The two reconcile their differences and take a cab to Ally’s apartment, where Jay helps her break in after she forgets her key. Then Heart Eyes attacks.

Heart Eyes kills their cab driver and chases them, then Hobbs and Shaw arrest Jay for the murders due to a wedding ring engraved with the initials “J.S.” being found at the winery where Heart Eyes murdered the first couple, though Jay claims his innocence. Well, it couldn’t be Jay could it? The slasher element comes more to the fore now, with plenty of kills by different means, though unsurprisingly it jars with most of what’s gone before, even if we appreciate that Heart Eyes was bound to eventually turn up to stalk and slash some more. Two potentially suspenseful moments are disrupted by goofiness, though there’s one fairly decent shock where Heart Eyes is suddenly seen in a wardrobe and it takes not one but two looks at him or her for this to register, and the majority of the horror side of things is actually played straight. The chasing and killing piles up as Ally and Jay are forced to flee all over the city, and it’s often exciting, even though Heart Eyes is sometimes curiously inept when confronting them. Mind you, we’ve seen this from other screen masked mass murderers. A sequence at a drive-in cinema is very well stages indeed, but unfortunately after that the plotting gets silly, and the climax is borderline disastrous, making little sense, even if, as one looks back on what came before, our three screenwriters – director Josh Ruben, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy – did play fair in terms of giving us some foreshadowing, though they would have probably engaged us more if they’d given us more characters who could be the killer. Thankfully we do get another surprise or two. though the final act really is poorly handled, along with some distinctively iffy acting from some of the players present.

This doesn’t totally ruin a film that contains some good things that slash fans might love, such as Heart Eyes’s memorable mask seemingly made out of leather with a pair of heart-shaped goggles, and his or her propensity for killing with a crossbow with retractable bolts which suggests a nasty Cupid.  However, this leads me as to why I think this film essentially fails, despite its plusses. The folk involved work in the horror genre and definitely love it, despite me not being too fond of some of their output. However, while they lean towards the comedic side of things anyway, they’ve never done romantic comedy, so, while they’ve tried to combine these two genres, their relative disinterest in this very different type of genre can’t help but reveal itself. I’m not saying that they should have rang Richard Curtis and asked him to help out with the screenplay, but maybe a greater look at this kind of movie, and how it works for the many people who like it, would have been a good idea. When our couple are getting to know each other, we’re frequently reminded of Heart Eyes and that they’re in danger, but once the slashing and the running begin, the film seems to for almost forget the rom-com aspect, except for a cinema showing His Girl Friday, an airport dash and a bit when Aly is the stereotypically klutzy leading lady and rather cocks up a dramatic entrance through a broken window. A nice reversal of tropes sees Ally as the reluctant, defensive one who eventually takes the lead in going into action, while Jay is the more sensitive kind, a hopeless romantic. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding are okay individually whilst playing their parts but don’t share the necessary energy, which means that we’re not us bothered about them potentially getting together as we might wish.

Tonally more Scream than Scary Movie when it isn’t trying to involve us in its meh romance, all in all Heart Eyes is okay in terms of what it sets out to do – which isn’t much – but it could have tried to do a lot more. But then if you still fancy a good Valentine date movie after the event, when all the ripoff “set menus” in restaurants are no more, surely you’ll be spending as much time snogging and groping in the back row anyway….