Heart Eyes review – junky Valentine's slasher is hard to fall for

The Guardian

07-02-2025

After Scream revitalised both the slasher and the horror genre at large back in 1996, the inevitable flood of junkier imitators arrived, less interested in reinventing the wheel and more in keeping the engine running. Quick to write and cheap to make, films like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Cherry Falls and Valentine trotted out slightly different variations on the same formula (masked killer, WB channel teens) until the films became dumber than the ones Scream had been targeting in the first place.
It tracks then that after a Ghostface reboot, with 2022's surprisingly successful fifth instalment, the same would happen once again. Heart Eyes, a film that boasts the same production company and one of its stars, is exactly what an exec would give an easy greenlight to, an easily sellable 'if you liked' knock-off. But whatever might have made sense on paper just doesn't translate to screen, a fun little concept that ends up being something of a drag.
Like the aforementioned Valentine, a 2001 also-ran that saw a group of one-time high school mean girls targeted by the guy they once bullied, Heart Eyes is set on the most romantic day of the year. It's a date that had been traditionally used by studios as an obvious rom-com launchpad but this year, it's attracted the opposite from sexbot-gone-wrong sci-fi comedy Companion to fighting exes actioner Love Hurts to ghosting horror The Dead Thing to toxic relationship tale I Love You Forever. Heart Eyes exists somewhere between a romantic comedy and a horror, skewering the structure of the meet-cute with the inclusion of a serial killer hunting the boy who's just met the girl.
The killer only targets couples and in a rubbishy, red-flag raising cold open, we see an Instagram-obsessed pair stage a cheesy proposal at a vineyard before getting slaughtered. Each year lands him (or her) in a different city and it's finally time for Seattle or at least the New Zealand-filmed approximation of Seattle (with bit parts also played by uneasily accented locals, it's a clearly non-American American movie). Ally (Olivia Holt) is very okay with having no date for the big day, turning her nose up at Valentine's expectations, too focused on her job at an advertising firm to have time for distraction. It's there where she meets the handsome and far more romantically inclined freelancer Jay (Scream's Mason Gooding) who she has to work with for the day before he flies off to his best friend's wedding. It's Hallmark 101 but the script, from Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, isn't smart or witty enough to do much more than just recycle cliches and point at them, and the synthetic rom-com world they're in never as exaggerated or fun as it was in high-concept Rebel Wilson parody Isn't It Romantic (the eye-rollingly stupid behaviour by pretty much every character edges the film closer to a horror spoof).
There are laughs to be mined from their burgeoning romance needing to be underplayed to evade a killer who only wants to butcher those in love but the comedy here is far too broad, misfiring to the point of frequent embarrassment (the cops on the trail are called Hobbs and Shaw because, you know, the film Hobbs and Shaw, end of joke). Landon and Kennedy previously found just the right balance of comedy and horror in 2020's underseen Freaky (a film that also managed some brief moments of real emotion) but they're flailing here, the script a closer cousin to Kennedy's shoddy, critically reviled Netflix horror Time Cut. If the romance is uninvolving (Gooding is charming but Holt indistinctive) and the comedy aggressively unfunny then it's left to the horror to impress, and director Josh Ruben does deliver on some inventive gore but it feels discordant in a film that would be best enjoyed by very young, very undiscerning tweens (he's also, like many other genre directors today, unable to generate suspense). Like Riverdale before it, Heart Eyes employs some ex-teen stars to wink at those of us who remembered the last cycle (The Faculty's Jordana Brewster and Final Destination's Devon Sawa) but the film pales in comparison to even the weakest of that era, devolving into a finale of predictable who-cares reveals.
No one expects, or wants, every slasher to emulate the snappy self-awareness of Scream but Ruben isn't even able to conjure up the fun of something with far less expectation attached. I was reminded of Eli Roth's Thanksgiving – another back-to-basics holiday-based horror with the 00s on its mind – which was the kind of low-stakes, high-reward jolt that I would happily see more of in this era of slasher re-emergence, a film made with real affection for the genre. There's very little love to be found here.
Heart Eyes is now in US cinemas and will be out in the UK on 14 February