Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Heart Eyes

Heart Eyes

A wild genre-hybrid with clear love for slashers and rom-coms, Heart Eyes is a bloody good time.

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Horror blends well with a lot of genres. Action is one of the most obvious. A lot of horror movies involve some degree of action whether it's fighting off a knife-wielding villain or popping zombies in the head. And considering the genre's camp roots, there's a lot of opportunities for comedy as well. But romance? Not very common. At best romance is a part of the horror movie, usually as a chaser to the movie's otherwise bleak outlook and at worst it's used so the movie can undercut that joy with more despair. So the idea of a slasher rom-com sounds like a wild idea. Which brings us to Heart Eyes a movie that not only dares to try this cursed combo, but makes it work.

The Setup

The movie follow Ally McCabe, a marketing contractor whose latest campaign is being eaten alive online. To solve the problem, her employer has brought in a charming gun-for-hire named Jay who invites Ally out for a working dinner. While that sounds tense by itself, things go from awkward to lethal when a serial killer who murders couples known as "Heart Eyes" targets Ally and Jay...

The biggest hiccup with a slasher movie is how to make your movie look/feel different than every other slasher. Because, yes it's very creepy to have a guy with a knife coming after you regardless of context, but genre fans have seen that to hell and back by now. What makes Heart Eyes so impressive is that it forges its own identity while working within its two genres, slasher and rom-com.

Something that the writers figured out is that the arcs in rom-coms and slashers have potential for overlap. Both genres frequently include passive or stuck lead characters who are forced to become a better version of themselves. In slashers, that push comes from the blade wielding psycho and in rom-coms the push comes from a potential romantic partner that they clash with.

In Heart Eyes Ally is both closed off from love due to both a sour outlook on romance and a recent heartbreak, which is challenged by Jay, and in a life rut, that a rough run-in with a slasher would also challenge. So now the anti-romance lead character has to fend off a villain who thinks she's in love, which kinda makes the villain a meta-audience avatar of sorts, with a guy that might love her or hate her and is also a challenge to her career.

Something I really like is that the movie isn't afraid to make Ally unpleasant. Not movie unpleasant. More like, clearly has emotional hang-ups she hasn't worked through and they spill out onto other people kind of unpleasant. It's a staple of Christopher Landon's work (who co-wrote and produced the movie), and it's one I really like. 

And then we get into the slasher of it all, which this movie nails. Heart Eyes in look and action is one of the best slasher villains in recent memory. The costuming is generic slasher villain until the mask which is both cartoony and creepy (the combo of leather mask and neon light eyes works really well). The motivation is clearly centered around romance and toying with the victims before they meet their end. And the signature weapon is actually a collection of weapons including crossbow bolts with hearts on the end. I also enjoy how Heart Eyes is a known entity in this world, as a known serial killer that hops around the area killing off couples. It means the movie can make the killer feel like an inescapable viral sensation vs. an urban legend coming to life.

Josh Ruben is also a perfect choice to direct this movie. Ruben is best known for his work in two worlds, horror filmmaking and comedy, thanks to his previous directorial efforts Scare Me and Werewolves Within, that also featured heavy comedic bents, and his work with Dropout where he's a recurring player on the service's improv show Make Some Noise. The thing that's always stood out to me about Ruben's directorial work is his sense of timing and dynamics. He's really good and feeling the pace of the a scene, feeling the pause of anticipation and then filling that moment with a scare or a fake-out. Which is exactly what you want from a slasher movie when the killer is in pursuit. Ruben is also very good at staging these scenes so we always know where folks are in relation to the killer (when we need to) and each face-off with Heart Eyes feels like a pitched battle for survival.

That sense of comedic timing means he's happy to lean into the movie's rom-com aspects and play up individual moments for laughs including a "trying things on" montage that references about five other movies.

This is also the kind of meta-textual fun Ruben likes to have within the genre often undercutting genre tropes with a violent payoff or joke (kinda the same thing in this genre hybrid), throwing in casual visual references to other movies, or having fun with Heart Eyes identity/reveal. Great merger of material and director here.

The complaints I have center around a few repeated beats in the chase sequences and some awkward shifts between the film's two genres. For instance, a lot of the face offs with Heart Eyes are turned around by one of our two leads about to be killed and then the other person arrives to stab or smash them in the face. And there's a few times where the movie is seemingly aching for a joke to undercut the shmaltzy nature of an individual scene or shifts from kinda funny to "lord in heaven what made that person say THAT?"

All of these are minor complaints though, because what Heart Eyes truly accomplishes is delivering a holiday horror movie for Valentine's Day, that actually has fun with the holiday itself.

The Verdict: A Lot of Fun

A wild genre-hybrid with clear love for slashers and rom-coms, Heart Eyes is a bloody good time. 8/10

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