Like a Valentine’s nougat surrounded by creamy milk chocolate, Josh Ruben’s sardonic “Heart Eyes” is a stealth romantic comedy in the coating of a slasher—or perhaps a secret slasher in the trappings of a rom-com. However you approach its calibrated seesaw of tonal juxtapositions, it is mostly effective, because the director and his writers know and appreciate the pleasures and pitfalls of both genres. “Heart Eyes” is nothing if not a meta romp through their most shopworn tropes.
The opening scene establishes the movie’s signature combination of horror and irony, shock and “aww.” A couple is filming their engagement proposal in a Seattle winery—because if it’s not on social media, it didn’t really happen—in a saccharine heartland fairytale complete with deliberately cringe dialogue (“you’re my person”) and a terrible country song piping through a Bluetooth speaker. The moment of manufactured romance will soon be disrupted by a serial killer with heart-shaped eye slits in a Leatherface-style mask. One of the weapons in his arsenal is a bow and arrow—just like Cupid.
“Heart Eyes” is set in Seattle, which happens to be the lucky city upon which this peripatetic villain has set his heart eyes this Valentine’s Day, after previous Feb. 14 slaughters in other metropolitan cities. The news is saturated with coverage of the Heart Eyes Killer, or HEK, murdering the aforementioned fiancées, along with other victims in a spa. Evidently he only butchers couples; perhaps he’s “some incel living in his mother’s basement,” proposes a police officer at one of the early crime scenes. Why the city commences with its large-scale, soft-target Valentine’s Day-themed events, knowing full well there’s a killer on the loose, is one of the film’s many logical lapses we’re not supposed to ponder. We’re better off surrendering to the clichés and, to paraphrase a lesser rom-com, to just go with it.
We encounter our leads in a meet-cute as twee as any in recent memory. Ally (Olivia Holt), a struggling pitch designer for a jewelry company who nonetheless holds a jaundiced view of love, bumps heads with Mason Gooding’s Jay, just after they converge at a coffee shop counter: It turns out they’ve both ordered the exact same baroquely specific latte.
Though Ally wants no part of romance this Valentine’s Day, Jay is literally irresistible: Moments later, we find out that he’s just been hired by Ally’s company (gasp!) to help restructure her disastrous new pitch, which places diamond jewelry in the context of lovers’ death scenes in classic American movies. It’s not long before Jay is asking her out that very night—as colleagues, of course, on a strictly professional basis—positioning themselves as attractive victims for the title killer, despite Ally’s persistent protestations that they’re “not even a couple!”
For director Ruben, blending comedy and horror is not new; it’s been the preferred chemistry equation in his 2020 debut “Scare Me” and its follow-up, 2021’s “Werewolves Within.” These films are carried by their genre literacy, and references to cinematic styles and vintage films are at the heart of “Heart Eyes” as well. As they frequently collide with each other in compromising positions, Ally and Jay become tethered together like a mistaken Hitchcock couple on the run; when Ally finds herself on a children’s carousel of doom, the dizzying action resembles the fevered climax of Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.” A drive-in movie screening of “His Girl Friday” is another reference point, with a relationship dynamic mirroring that of our hero and heroine. If there’s still any doubt, by the film’s final third, that we’re watching characters wrested from celluloid tradition going through their motions, Ally’s friend Monica’s (Gigi Zumbado) inspirational speech to a heartbroken Ally is filled almost exclusively with the names of rom-com favorites: “It’s a crazy, stupid love … actually.”
As for the other genre in which “Heart Eyes” so gleefully trades? It’s … fine. Scares are few and far between, but when the killer inserts his sharp objects into people’s most sensitive orifices, the results are sufficiently revolting, even if, when it comes to piercing the mortality of our protagonists, Heart Eyes is woefully inept at his otherwise tactically precise hobby. The third-act reveal is by far the movie’s weak point, in part because of its sheer predictability and in part because of an abject silliness that, even in the movie’s irony-drenched context, is difficult to accept.
“Heart Eyes,” for all its winking successes, ultimately falls short of new-classic status because it’s not subversive; it’s just fun. If you don’t overthink it, you’re more likely to enjoy its tailored combination of the cheesy and queasy.
“Heart Eyes” is playing in most theaters now.
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