Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, and not long ago that meant romantic comedies and dramas dominating the box office. Since COVID and the streaming boom, however, straight-up romantic comedies (along with comedies in general, save for action blockbusters and kids animation) have become a rarity at the multiplex. Horror, on the other hand, is back with a vengeance—the only genre on which studios both big and small are willing to take risks. Heart Eyes, the third horror-comedy from director and CollegeHumor alum Josh Ruben, does right by both genres. It’s both a pretty good post-Kevin Williamson slasher movie and a pretty good post-Nora Ephron studio romcom. The finished recipe isn’t much more than the sum of its ingredients, but when one of those ingredients is in such short supply, the result is some welcome — if blood-splattered — comfort food.
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HEART EYES ★★1/2 (2.5/4 stars) |
Heart Eyes is essentially a mash-up of two different movie pitches. One is a well-trodden slasher premise: A masked killer goes on a murder spree targeting couples on Valentine’s Day. The other is the sort of movie that would have starred Helen Hunt in the late 90s or Julia Stiles in the mid-2000s: A jaded marketing executive (Olivia Holt) fouls up at work, and must cooperate with a handsome, charming freelancer (Mason Gooding) who might be after her job. The plots collide when the Heart Eyes Killer mistakes these rivals for a couple, forcing them to run for their lives together and fast-track the enemies-to-lovers romance that fate has clearly set up for them.
Both genres receive a gentle ribbing, but as often as Heart Eyes gives “parody movie trailer” energy, it also offers the chemistry and sincerity that one expects from a pure romcom. Holt and Gooding have solid chemistry, and the romance between them feels surprisingly organic considering they are being bombarded by the contrivances of two genres simultaneously. Gooding in particular nails the non-threatening hunk vibe that a turn-of-the-century romcom calls for, while injecting a surprising amount of Seinfeldian quirk into the voice of his character. (Mind you, Jerry Seinfeld was never a romantic lead! It’s a weird ingredient to put in there, and I respect it.) Both Holt’s Ally and Gooding’s Jay are fairly cookie-cutter on the page (this is a genre send-up, after all), but there’s life in the performances.
Much bolder are the movie’s gags, which are naturally more heightened than one would find in a My Best Friend’s Wedding, and involve a lot more brain and bone fragments. The film’s riffs on romcom structural obligations — the meet-cute, the midpoint misunderstanding — involve more slapstick, pushing the physical stakes beyond what a romcom usually permits. Some of the stock characters from both genres get cranked up to sketch comedy extremes, particularly Allie’s evil boss (a scene-stealing Michaela Watkins) and a macho police detective (Devon Sawa). Surrounding your more grounded characters like Ally, Jay, and Jordana Brewster’s Detective Shaw with broad cartoons helps each of them feel more real by contrast, even as they play in this space. (Brewster’s long career as the put-upon straight woman of the Fast & Furious franchise makes it easy to forget that she is, in fact, pretty funny.)
Comedy slashers also have license to go bigger and nastier with their kills, and Ruben takes full advantage of this, setting up some elaborate and ironic deaths with the imagination you expect from a Jason Vorhees type. The Heart Eyes Killer (HEK) is never exactly scary — this is a slasher in the Ghostface vein, meaning a mere mortal who takes their fair share of licks, rather than an unstoppable supernatural force. What HEK has that other slasher villains don’t is a cool Batman villain vibe, complete with gadgets and an action figure-ready costume design. The lazy version of this movie would have settled for its villain being simply a Michael Myers homage and left it at that. Instead it’s gifted us its own iconic look that’s sure to make cosplay appearances at horror conventions this fall — though given the current frequency of solid horror movies, probably not long after that.
This is probably why Heart Eyes impresses more as a romantic comedy than as a slasher movie. The movie isn’t doing anything terribly new in either genre, but the formula of romcom Heart Eyes is playing with has been out of theatrical circulation for long enough that even a straightforward example is a nice change of pace. Heart Eyes will probably drop off your list of 2025’s Top 5 horror flicks by spring. As contemporary romcoms go, Heart Eyes might end up being the year’s best.
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