The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
Being a huge fan of holiday slasher movies, I was very much looking forward to Heart Eyes. In my household, the calendar is secondary to viewings of Black Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving and My Bloody Valentine in marking the passage of time. The basic premise of Heart Eyes asks an intriguing question: What would it be like if the plot of a romantic comedy was interrupted by the plot of a slasher movie? That’s a great idea on paper and I’m on board for a conceptual crossover between When Harry Met Sally and Scream. Unfortunately, the filmmakers failed to combine particularly good examples of either genre, giving us something more akin to You’ve Got Mail crossed with Scream 3. It turns out that if you combine two crappy movies together, you just get one crappy movie in half the time.
The film (admittedly uniquely) opens with the killer already established and well known to the public. For the last few years, the Heart Eyes killer has emerged in a different city every Valentine’s Day and slaughtered couples. This year he has set his sights on Seattle, where a marketing executive named Ally (played by Olivia Holt) is forced to work with Jay (played by Mason Gooding) on a new project. Heart Eyes mistakes them for a couple and the rest of the film is essentially a cat-and-mouse chase between the killer and the reluctant couple.
The romantic comedy portion of the film is intentionally generic, hitting every trope and story beat that you would find in such a movie on Hallmark or Lifetime, but the intent doesn’t make it any less grating. The odd thing is that I actually love Hallmark Christmas movies. Fuck off with your negativity, those movies are magical, goddamn it. My wife doesn’t even like them and gets annoyed with me for putting them on, but we are going to sit on the fucking couch and watch the greedy lawyer fall in love with the small-town baker and we are going to be filled with the magic of the fucking season.
Maybe it is just the Christmas season that makes those movies work for me, because the romantic setup here is very much akin to Hallmark movies. Or maybe its because I watched Heart Eyes in a theater and it wasn’t just the 20th such movie to debut on cable on that month. Either way, I hold this to a higher standard and it just didn’t work for me. The characters are irritating, the story arc is generic reluctant-couple shtick and the couple has very little chemistry together. Aside from the over-the-top opening sequence, it never even really felt like satire to me; it just felt like half of a shitty romantic comedy script that they repurposed for a horror comedy.
The slasher half of the story didn’t do much for me, either. The killer has a cool enough look, but the film lacks tension and ultimately makes little sense (more on that in a minute). Up until the end, the kills aren’t particularly inspired and are hampered by the use of CGI blood. There is a fun setup involving a drive-in theater (that is showing the classic His Girl Friday, which just made me want to watch that movie again instead), but the movie just doesn’t seem to know what to do with it and it amounts to little more than wasted potential.
I’m not writing any spoilers, but this is a who-done-it style slasher movie where the reveal of the killers is somehow both incredibly obvious and completely nonsensical at the same time. That may be a first in screenwriting history. If you have seen movies like this before, or just have a good grasp of narrative structure, you will likely know who the killers are way, way before the film wants you to. But when you find out who they are and then you recall that the killer is in a different city every year, you have to wonder just how the fuck they are pulling this off. I waited for an answer that the movie never provided to me. That’s just lazy.
Heart Eyes is a romantic horror comedy that I didn’t find to be romantic, funny or scary. That’s an ambitious failure, at least. I also have to give the film credit for a clever concept that I do think could have worked with a few more drafts of the script. But, as it is, this will not be joining the ranks of annual slasher viewings for me.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Eyes#/media/File:Heart_Eyes_(2025)_poster.jpg
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