Review: Heart Eyes (2025)

Heart Eyes (2025)

Rated R for strong violence and gore, language and some sexual content

Score: 3 out of 5

What happens when a romantic comedy and a slasher movie have a meet cute under the pen of Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon, two filmmakers who, in the last several years, have started a mini-trend of horror/comedy parodies of classic movies? You get Heart Eyes, a film that, instead of spoofing a specific movie (as Happy Death Day did with Groundhog Day, Totally Killer did with Back to the Future, or It's a Wonderful Knife with It's a Wonderful Life), is instead sending up a broader genre, the romantic comedy. Specifically, it's a sendup of the '90s romantic comedy formula that Nora Ephron popularized, with specific allusions to Sleepless in Seattle even though the two films otherwise don't have much in common beyond the setting. And, if I do say so myself, it's a film that honors its inspirations even if it's ultimately not much more than empty-calorie popcorn entertainment to be dumped into theaters on Super Bowl weekend in the hopes it finds its legs around the double Valentine's Day/President's Day weekend to follow (a strategy that, by all accounts, worked). It's at once a fun slasher with a very high body count and also a legitimately good romantic comedy anchored by two leads who feel like they would've been just as good in a straightforward "chick flick" as they are in a horror movie. There were plot contrivances that didn't entirely ring true, it's built on clichés on top of clichés lifted from both of the genres it's rooted in, and the big reveal of the killer's identity was telegraphed a bit too blatantly, but watching those clichés interact with each other was like... well, like watching the central relationship in a rom-com flourish. It's a fun diversion, and a movie I heartily recommend.

The film starts with an obnoxious young couple (implied to be influencers) and their photographer getting brutally murdered at a winery by the Heart Eyes Killer, a serial killer who strikes every Valentine's Day, targets couples, and is named for the glowing red, heart-shaped eyes in their mask. Having previously struck Boston and Philadelphia, "HEK", as the media has dubbed the killer, has now come to Seattle, just in time for Ally McCabe, who works in marketing for a jewelry company, to be forced to work on a new ad campaign with the hotshot designer Jay Simmons after a previous ad campaign she designed goes over like a lead balloon. Ally and Jay insist that there's nothing between them, to each other most of all, but HEK thinks otherwise and decides to go after them.

Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding are this film's twin anchors as its protagonists, the young co-workers whose sparks of chemistry make them a target. It's classic rom-com boilerplate, and they play it well, their characters both feeling like they could've stepped out of an actual romantic comedy, Holt as the frazzled heroine who doesn't realize she's longing for love and Gooding as the handsome hunk with a heart of gold who shows up to supply her with what she's missing. It's with their characters that the film stands apart from other slashers, the two of them never really feeling like conventional horror protagonists but rather like they got dragged into a horror movie against their will from a completely different genre -- and then reacting as a rom-com couple would to suddenly finding themselves in the middle of a slasher flick. It was a chemistry that needed to work for this movie to succeed, and the two of them hit it off wonderfully, anchoring the rom-com side of this film's genre fusion while director Josh Ruben handled the horror. Ruben is no stranger to horror-comedies, and he makes this one both funny and bloody, with a staggeringly high body count paired with a lot of supporting characters acting like cartoonish assholes so that we don't feel so bad when we watch them die. There are some graphic highlights for gorehounds, including a kill with a tire iron that the trailers sadly spoiled, the creative use of an industrial wine press, and a beheading that stands as one for the ages. HEK, too, is a solid presence, the admittedly goofy-looking mask not only working with the film's more comedic tone but also giving the killer an immediately recognizable and memorable image, while also being shown to have night vision capabilities to make them more threatening. The big reveal of the killer's identity wore its homages to Scream on its sleeve, complete with a moment preempting a common debate among fans of those films by showing us exactly how certain things went down, and not only was it amusing, but I think I liked the killer even more after the reveal than before thanks to some charismatic acting.

Alas, it's in the writing where the film is held back from greatness. While this is an admittedly well-made example of both a romantic comedy and a modern slasher, I'd be hard-pressed to find any moments in this movie that actually surprised me where either genre was concerned. I correctly called who the killer was almost immediately after one scene that played a particular game with one character's "death" that I'm all too familiar with from watching whodunit slashers, which was just the most glaring example of an overreliance on clichés in the writing department. At times, the film did some interesting things with these tropes, most notably when it takes the archetypal rom-com "race for your love" ending and spins it around into one character having to race to save the other from getting killed. That said, sometimes a cliché is just a cliché. This is a movie where you will see everything coming from a mile away, and it doesn't particularly try to excel beyond just playing the hits. There were also a few moments where I didn't fully buy the plot developments going on, particularly how it takes the "second-act breakup" and has it here be Ally suspecting that Jay is the killer after the actual killer tries to frame him, a contrivance that felt forced and made Ally look like an easily-misled dumbass. It felt like it was trying to copy what Scream did in casting suspicion on the boyfriend, but whereas Skeet Ulrich played Billy Loomis in that film as a pretty sketchy guy who could very well be Ghostface, absolutely nothing in this film pointed to Jay being the killer barring some flimsy evidence. I would've made Jay a slightly more troubled figure in order to sell this conflict, somebody who, instead of a completely perfect, idealized boyfriend, is still a good guy but one who has some darkness in his past that he needs to confront and overcome. Maybe he watched somebody close to him die violently, and this experience is bringing back all sorts of awful memories that are causing him to act strangely? Finally, I think some of the supporting cast were wasted, especially those from the rom-com side of the story. I was waiting for Ally's cute best friend to get targeted to raise the stakes, or for her asshole boss to get what was coming to her, but they vanished from the film for most of its runtime and had little bearing on the plot except as seasoning for Ally's character.

The Bottom Line

My Bloody Valentine is still the reigning champion of Valentine's Day slashers, but this easily makes the cut as something a bit more lighthearted that, while imperfect, still delivers where it counts. Go check it out. I expect it to have pretty long legs as a film for this holiday.