Heart Eyes

2025 | rated R | starring Oliva Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins, Jordana Brewster, Devon Sawa | directed by Josh Ruben | 1h 37m | 3 1/2 out of 5 |

Every year for the last 3 years, the Heart Eyes Killer has been slaughtering couples on Valentine’s Day. This year his reign of terror hits Seattle, WA, where Ally’s (Olivia Holt, Cruel Summer) cynical-on-love jewelry company ad campaign has cratered the company on social media requiring the involvement of freelance ad agent Jay (Mason Gooding, Scream VI) to come in and clean up the mess. But a night of work meetings and dodging her ex, has made the Heart Eyes Killer think the office rivals are a couple and sets his sights on them forcing Ally and Jay to try to survive the most romantic night of the year.

One of the reasons horror movies (and slasher movies specifically) endure, grow and innovate over the years is because it’s the only genre that regularly reconciles with its own tropes. Whether it’s Scream or The Cabin in the Woods, no other genre questions its character’s decisions and intelligence like a horror movie. A few other genres have half-attempted and failed, The Last Action Hero for action and the Rebel Wilson shrug Isn’t it Romantic made a gun-to-the-head attempt, but these movies never really want to dive into why these tropes exist and spin them into something fun. So leave it to a slasher movie to make the best romantic comedy parody in years. Heart Eyes threads all of the tropes of a rom-com through all of the tropes of a slasher movie and comes out a surprisingly sweet movie, amid the blood splatter, for our decidedly un-romantic times.

Directed by Josh Ruben – who showed a knack for this wacky horror/comedy blend with Scare Me and Werewolves Within and co-written by slasher blender Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky), Heart Eyes introduces a cool new slasher villain design, puts him up against two charming leads and flips about every trope it can think of on its head on the way to the ultimate sucker bait: Heart Eyes is a love story after all. If the movie doesn’t 100% live up to its big picture potential, I still think it’s a script people will be looking at for years to come for a lot of ambitious stuff it does right in the details.

First thing’s first, we have a gender flip in our leads. Mason Gooding is playing a character very close to Chad in Scream 6, a man confident enough to be a little wacky and put his heart on his sleeve when it comes to romance. Olivia Holt is given the cynic role usually given to the men in these movies, that love is a fantasy designed by ad agencies. She’s jilted and he has nobody in sight. The world-building of the film is solid all around. Not only does it feel like it’s set in Seattle instead of Generic City, but it’s awash in Valentine’s Day decor. Everywhere our heroes run in their race for survival is adorned with heart decorations or love songs or overly-romantic Uber drivers dispensing unsolicited advice. Its biggest set piece is centered around a drive-in movie theater to create a straight line of bickering couples who find love all the way back to a classic like His Girl Friday. 

Second, we have a genre flip. Heart Eyes is ultimately a rom-com wrapped around a slasher movie, rather than a slasher movie with a rom-com inside it (like say Shaun of the Dead). While it puts moments of bonding between our leads next to moments of gnarly violence and gore, it also remains firmly planted in the honesty of the budding romance. The opposite of this is what we see all the time: a movie ironic in its juxtaposition of romance and violence to undercut the romance, to show an audience that thinks romantic comedies are lame that it also thinks rom-coms are lame. Heart Eyes doesn’t think romance is dead and rom-coms are lame, but it does skew their tropes – from an opening Meet Cute at a coffee shop to the final race-to-the-airport, everything you’ve seen before gets folded in here and given new life by the parody. Our characters are reluctantly living in a rom-com and a slasher movie and are equally concerned with both. I was knocked out by this movies’ ending. That it didn’t have some cynical tag on the end of it and had the nerve to follow through on its promise all the way.

The movie makes a few some mis-steps along the way, namely in the third act. The movie has a Killer Reveal in the third act that it didn’t necessarily need, doesn’t elevate the movie and actually undermines the more interesting motive Heart Eyes may have presented earlier in the movie. At this point my mind was spinning back to the involvement of Christopher Landon, who was at one time attached to direct Scream 7. The climax of this movie feels SO much like a Scream movie that I wonder how much of it was made from scrapped Scream 7 ideas. The killers themselves are entirely predictable. If you’re going to a murder mystery/Scooby Doo killer reveal, you need to populate the movie with more possible suspects. There are simply too few characters in this movie to work out.

Heart Eyes is one of those movies that I will actually say could stand to be longer. It’s running a tight survive-the-night story, but there is also a lot of meat left on the bones here. I would have liked to see Ally and Jay actually work on their campaign or a discussion of how dating apps and swipes have affected romance or how single people feel on Valentine’s Day. The movie touches on all of these, but keeps moving in its race to the next thing. It mostly holds together well, but I could have used a little more. Still there is a lot of fun to be had here. Heart Eyes manages to both scratch the violent slasher movie itch with a new sequel-ready villain and skewer rom-coms while being an honest one itself. More than that, it dares to be romantic in a media landscape that seems allergic to it.