HEART EYES (2025)

New in theaters from Screen Gems!
Directed by Josh Rubin.
Written by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, Michael Kennedy.
Check out the trailer here!!

A slasher known as the Heart Eyes Killer has been murdering couples for the last two years; one bloody rampage in New York, and another one in Philadelphia. Now, the killer has set his heart shaped lenses towards Seattle, the home town of a newly jilted advertising marketer named Ally (played by Olivia Holt). Ally is having issues at work because her broken heart is getting in the way of selling that new pitch for a jewelry line and her new pitch, depicting movie relationships that have ended in death, really rings insensitive while a serial killer is offing couples in the really real world. After a bumbling meet-cute at a coffee shop with nice guy Jay (played by Mason Gooding, son of Cuba), Ally finds out Jay has been called in to clean up her mess at the ad agency. What a predicament? The two decide to meet after work to come up with new, more romantic ideas for an ad campaign, but wouldn’t you know it, the Heart Eyes Killer has set his sights on them as his newest victims.

HEART EYES is three fourths of a decent little cat-and-mouse slasher, reminiscent of THE STRANGERS as the bulk of the film focuses on the relationship between two characters. While the original STRANGERS focused on one long night of breakup between two lovers eventually interrupted by a trio of masked killers, HEART EYES does the opposite and focuses on two people falling in love while running away from a killer for the whole film. Sure there’s a pretty high one too as the killer slashes his way through a drive in theater leaving many bodies in his wake, but HEART EYES, after a very gory opening kill and all of the rom com setup I went into in the previous paragraph, basically is one killer pursing two people for an entire night. Though there are a few detours, the bulk of this film does the cat and mouse sequence quite proficiently. The Heart Eyes Killer is brutal and violent, using an array of pointy pokey-things to take on his prey. The action is swift and once the chase begins, it goes on and on and on without giving the audience much of a chance to breathe.

During this extended chase, though, there were indications that this movie wasn’t going to end up being the Valentine’s classic it desperately wants to be. I know HEART EYES is supposed to be a rom com horror film, but man, does it feel like it was written by an older aunt whose reference to rom coms begins and ends in the nineties. The movie name dropping in this film is atrocious; My Best Friend’s Wedding. 10 Things I Hate About You. Notting Hill. These references are not cleverly inserted into the story. They are clumsily crammed into dialog. It’s kind of like the obvious attempts at humor tried in the SCARY MOVIE franchise—when there’s no joke, just someone mentioning something like Silence of the Lambs or The Sixth Sense, and then the braindead audience guffaw and say, “Dey said duh name of duh movie I know!” You know your frame of reference has cobwebs when the most recent pop culture reference in your movie is Hobbes and Shaw. I shit you not, there’s a Hobbes and Shaw reference in HEART EYES.

On top of that, much of this movie feels as if it was written in 2016. There is a whole lot of attention paid to online image. The fact that the lead’s entire career teeters on reactions on social media made me scoff so hard my popcorn went flying out of my mouth. There’s even a mention of doxing. What’s next? A Harambe reference? I know this is still may be a thing on the coasts, but man, does it ring like an episode of Antique Roadshow in this post-X era, where the mob power of cancellation on Twitter has gone the way of the dodo.

But as I said, I would have forgiven some of this had the film delivered with some teeth. Yes, there is a gory opening sequence. Yes, the Heart Eyes Killer is brutal and sports a variety of pointy weapons of slaughter. Yes, the cat and mouse chase was intriguing and downright scary at times. But any and all momentum the film gains is smothered with discourse and exposition in the final twenty minutes. The reveal is bad. Really bad. And all it does is point out the blaring potholes that pimple up throughout the whole rest of the movie. How did the killer know where Ally lived? How could the killer get into the apartment so quickly? How could the killer be in New York and Philly, and then have what seems to be a steady, long-term job in Seattle? How does the Heart Eyes Killer look one way all through the movie, yet have a completely different body type in flashback in order to justify who the killer is? The film is set up to be a mystery asking “Who is the Heart Eyes Killer?” But there are so few characters to choose from, that once it is revealed, it turns out to be only who is left alive? And even then it’s a strain for Ally and even the audience to get who the hell it is? I want to rant more but I don’t want to spoil this film, even though it deserves to be since the ending is that rotten.

The worst offence is that HEART EYES can’t commit to being either a rom com or a horror movie. In the end it tries to sweeten the film up which only undercuts the violence and mayhem that has occurred. HEART EYES gums its way to the credits, meaning that it lacks the incisors to even end like a horror film. Sure, there are films where those tormented get out alive, but in most good horror movies, the evil has left its mark. In HEART EYES, even in the face of danger, Ally and Jay quip and joke. If the characters aren’t taking the horror seriously, why should the audience?

HEART EYES is a horror film you take your partner who doesn’t really like serious horror to. It’s cute horror. And I don’t hate cute horror. I liked LISA FRANKENSTEIN even with all of its writing plot holes. It just feels like a movie that was set out to be non-offensive to anyone, giving the viewer who prefers rom com’s to horror what they want, no matter the splatter that happened before it. YULE LOG 2 mixed rom com and horror so seamlessly well. Watch that film. It’s as cute as a button on a button but still respects the horror. HEART EYES just feels too try-hard in every way. So too try-hard that it can’t commit to anything. It wants to be nineties-cool, 2016-relevant and 2020-progressive (don’t get me started on the final scene), all while trying to deliver that extreme horror that has been on the rise over the last year. It can’t even fully commit to having a teaser that the horror is not over in the end as it might shatter the feel-good mood it desperately wants to establish as the audience walks out of the theater.
So, no HEART EYES is not going to be a new Valentine’s classic. While there are some decent moments of chase, gore, and horror, the film fails to stick the landing by attempting to please everyone. Just rewatch MY BLOODY VALENTINE or even its sequel for solid Valentine’s horror.

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