Christopher Landon is having a ball these days making pop horror movie mash-ups. His new film Heart Eyes (2025), which he wrote and produced for director Josh Ruben, follows the Happy Death Day movies (mashing the slasher film with Groundhog Day) and Freaky (mashing the slasher film with Freaky Friday). Heart Eyes is a slasher film for lovers, a film that eviscerates the rom com and winds up being surprisingly romantic anyway. But emphasis on the word "eviscerate," because this is a film that uses the full scope of what a hard R-Rating allows.
The plot follows a nationwide panic as St. Valentine's Day approaches. The previous two holidays have seen killing sprees by a mysterious figure known only as "The Heart Eyes Killer," after their distinctive mask with heart-shaped goggles. The Heart Eyes Killer targets couples for massacre. As the film opens, we meet a couple at a winery near Seattle, where a couple are going through an elaborate staging of their engagement. They have to do it twice because the cameraman they've hired bungles the first go round. When they contact the cameraman to see if he got the second take, there's no answer. He's been murdered by a crossbow bolt through the lens of his camera. Soon, the groom is dead, too, from a machete through the heart. The bride flees through the vineyard to the pressing building and hides in a wine press. This turns out to be unwise... The story then shifts to Ally McCabe, who works for a diamond and jewelry firm as an ad designer. Her latest campaign has been an unqualified disaster, highlighting doomed romances throughout history, which is in bad taste given the Heart Eyes Killer's killing spree. She expects to be fired at a meeting on the morning of St. Valentine's day. She's nursing a bad break-up and cyber-stalking her ex, who has a new girlfriend. This has Ally on edge, too. At a coffee shop before the meeting, she meets Jay Simmonds, who, unbeknownst to her, is the man who will try to rescue her campaign. He seems a perfect potential romantic partner, but Ally is irked that he'll be taking her job. But, damn, he's handsome and charming. He asks her to dinner at an upscale restaurant to discuss the campaign, a dinner that at first seems romantic, but turns sour with Ally's disgust at the way she panders to a holiday she doesn't believe in and the very idea of romantic love. On the way out of the restaurant, she and Jay run into Ally's ex, and to demonstrate that she's not pathetic after the break-up, she kisses Jay in front of them. Unfortunately for them, the Heart Eyes Killer spots the kiss stalk's Ally and Jay back to her apartment. Ally is annoyed at the killer, because doesn't he go after couples? She and Jay aren't a couple. The killer doesn't buy it, but he's interrupted in his pursuit of the two of them through a nearby park when the police arrive. They arrest Jay on suspicion of being the killer. The two cops on the case, Hobbs and Shaw, don't believe them. The Heart Eyes Killer tracks them to the police station, which is largely deserted because the cops are celebrating the capture of Heart Eyes. Ally and Jay barely escape, but the chase leads them to a great big open air Valentine's festival, where Heart Eyes suddenly has a target-rich environment...
When this film stages its big set piece at the Valentine's festival, there is an area devoted to a drive in movie. The movie they're showing is His Girl Friday, a classic screwball comedy, though a significantly darker movie than what that description usually evokes. I am sure that the producers chose this film because it's in the public domain and therefore free to use without paying for any rights, but it's not inapt. It is still probably a mistake, because you should never draw an audience's attention to a better film than the one they are watching. Be that as it may, the relationship between Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns is a bit like the relationship between Ally McCabe and Jay Simmonds, though, in which the two of them aren't a couple and spar about it for the length of the film, until they ARE a couple and finally realize it. It's a classic structure, here given extra flavor by the threat of death should they ever become a thing. I once had a Shakespeare professor call this sort of thing "Serious Relief" while pointing out the faked execution in All's Well that Ends Well as an example. His Girl Friday uses an execution as a clock, too. The fusion of a rom com with a slasher movie isn't as outre` as you might think. It generally works. If you have the stomach for the violence in Heart Eyes, you can absolutely groove on the romantic comedy if that's your bag. Given that romantic comedies have largely vanished from movie theaters, and that horror movies never will so long as there are theaters, you may have to accept the trade off for a while.
The romantic comedy is perfectly conceived. Ally McCabe is the kind of struggling yuppie who finds their natural habitat in romances, and the film puts a sly spin on things with the disastrous ad campaign she has designed. It's a black and white and red recounting of romances that have ended in doom and death, from Romeo and Juliet to Titanic and stops in between. It's the work of someone who clearly has issues with love and romance. This is made explicit in her absolutely rancid account of her role in the romance industry, which she reduces to selling "blood diamonds." It's a brutal deconstruction of the story she's in and a nod to the horror movie that's running concurrently with the romance. Jay, for his part, believes in love and romance, but Ally is a tough nut to crack and he wonders at times if it's even worth the effort. Jay is charming, absolutely constructed from a romance novel fantasy, and when that veneer slips after Ally shows a willingness to ditch him, his perfection collapses into an actual character. This too is a nice touch. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding as our battling couple understand the assignment perfectly. Gooding is a veteran of the Scream movies, so it's nice to see him in a different context. He has excellent comic timing and here seems like an actor from another age. Holt's performance is reminiscent of prime Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock, and is better than many of those performances. They both get able support from Gigi Zumbado as Ally's BFF and from Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa as the cops on the case. Brewster in particular adds some quirks to her character that play well in a rom com.
The horror elements of the film trip it up and it saves its missteps for the endgame, alas. Up until then, the film has a keen sense of its own absurdity and the mayhem is over the top in a way that makes it almost like slapstick. Certainly, the killer's choice of a weapon--a crossbow--is a demonic parody of Cupid. Its opening scene is a savage parody of contemporary wedding culture complete with an entitled dudebro groom abusing the wedding staff and a bridezilla who is incensed that a serial killer would ruin her big moment. In other hands, the violence in this film could all be nasty in a way that is unpalatable. The two gore gags that will endure in the memory are the scene in the wine press and the scene with the four way tire iron. At the end of the rampage at the Valentine's festival, Heart Eyes is taken down and unmasked and no one knows who he is, which would be a GREAT way to end the film. Not everything has to exist in a tight knot of screenwriting economy. The idea that the killer is some rando rather than someone the audience knows, and who has a back-story that will be explained (wisely or not, usually not) would be a sharp rebuke to the usual mistake of the slasher movie. Most slasher films explain too much. They rob the film of their mystery and sense of the uncanny when they do this. The solution to this trend is RIGHT THERE on the screen for the filmmakers to take. Alas, they choose to fall back on cliches, because of course they do. Cliches comfort an audience rather than challenge them. Thus, the horror-film element devolves into another tedious exercise in exegesis. Even here, the film functions as a parody of Scream, but unlike the rest of the film, it doesn't take the parody far enough to register as parody. That said, the gore gag at the end, echoing the actual martyrdom of St. Valentine, is a nice touch.
I mostly liked this, maybe? I was having a bad day when I saw it and was surprised at how much I laughed at it, so at a basic level, it's a success. Take that however you want. I wonder, though, if I liked this because I'm starved for something other than horror movies at the multiplex. There has been a new horror movie every weekend so far this year, and I can't help but wonder how much other types of movies are being subsumed into the genre or squeezed out because horror movies are the only things that get greenlit these days that isn't based on some existing intellectual property that Hollywood can sell you yet again. Still, I'd rather have this than the endless extra-judicial ex-espionage agents that choke the stuff that's made for streaming or the diminishing returns on superhero franchises. There's a lot of sludge in the movie pipeline right now.
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