Heart Eyes comes to us from writer/producer Christopher Landon. While he’s probably best known for Happy Death Day and its sequel (and getting jettisoned from Scream 7 after its producers kept finding new ways to fail), Landon is also responsible in some capacity for Freaky and We Have a Ghost. Also on board is Landon’s recurring collaborator, co-writer Michael Kennedy, who previously wrote the aforementioned Freaky and It’s a Wonderful Knife. The third screenwriter is Phillip Murphy, who previously wrote The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard; and the director is longtime CollegeHumor alumnus Josh Ruben.
Put it all together and there’s only one thing this collective filmography could produce: A subversive horror/comedy that takes bold swings and flails in all directions while trying to settle on a coherent tone.
The premise revolves around the Heart-Eyes Killer (or “HEK”), a masked serial killer who goes hunting couples on Valentine’s Day. The psychopath has been at it for two years now and nobody has any idea who the killer is, partly because it’s a different city getting terrorized every year. For this lucky third year, HEK has settled on Seattle (actually shot in New Zealand, which doesn’t look a damn thing like Seattle).
Our protagonist is Ally (Olivia Hoult), who works in advertising for a jewelry designer. Which means that she’s got the assignment of putting together a romantic ad campaign for Valentine’s Day while there’s a serial killer running around ruining the holiday. Oh, and Ally is completely disillusioned about notions of romance because she still hasn’t gotten over a really bad breakup.
Enter Jay (Mason Gooding), the impossibly perfect love interest, complete with a meet-cute at a coffee shop and an awkward re-introduction at Ally’s workplace. And of course it’s pure coincidence that Jay is only in town for Valentine’s Day, the one day when HEK just happens to be in town.
Anyway, Jay is in town as a freelance consultant to try and salvage something of the ad campaign that Ally went and royally cocked up. Between Ally’s deteriorating career, the social pressure to hook up with Jay, her paranoia that Jay is after her job, and the boatloads of relationship issues and romantic trauma that she’s taking out on Jay… yeah, poor Ally is really on edge.
Nevertheless, she agrees to meet with Jay to talk shop over dinner, which of course everyone assumes is a Valentine’s date. (Seriously, it’s a running gag how Jay and Ally have to keep telling everyone they’re not a couple.) What follows is a series of mistakes and misunderstandings too long and absurdly convoluted to sufficiently recap here. (Seriously, it’s a running gag how Jay and Ally can’t explain how and why everything happened without sounding like idiots.)
Long story short, Jay and Ally catch the attention of HEK. It’s half an hour into this 90-minute movie and we’re off to the races.
From start to finish, this movie is heightened in a way that makes it deceptively tough to gauge. What we’ve got here is a horror/romcom that tries to balance the two sides by going big and loud and over-the-top. The unfortunate downside to this approach is that literally everyone is a dunce. These characters are all loud. They are obnoxious. They are stupid. They are paper-thin caricatures. I could write a whole essay focused solely on the cops in this movie, featuring the most outrageously incompetent and harmfully negligent police work I’ve seen in any work of fiction since goddamn Time After Time.
The problem here is that it’s tough to figure out whether being this aggressively stupid is a bug or a feature. Yes, I get that this is supposed to be a romcom parody, but it’s never easy to make fun of something that’s basically made fun of itself for the past few decades. Moreover, when the film ends on a distinctly sappy romantic note, that muddies the waters a fair bit.
Perhaps most importantly, the parody feels mean-spirited in nature. Yes, some of that comes from the horror slasher angle, watching a homcidal maniac carve up romcom archetypes for our amusement. But when the characters are this heightened, this crass, this aggressively loud and brainless, there’s no sense of fun in watching this movie. For the life of me, I have no idea how seriously I’m supposed to take this plot or how the filmmakers expect me to feel about romcoms, Valentine’s Day, or romance in general after watching this movie.
To wit: There’s a monologue in the third act that was very specifically built to cram in as many romcom titles as possible. Is that supposed to be… funny? Reverential? Clever? Seriously, what do I do with that?
Oh, and that’s not even getting started on the jokes that have nothing to do with romcoms. My favorite example concerns the detective team of Zeke Hobbs and Jeanette Shaw, respectively played by Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster. Yes, we have a police team named “Hobbs and Shaw”. And one of them is literally played by a founding cast member of the “Fast and Furious” franchise. A character explicitly lampshades the reference, and both detectives claim they’ve never heard of the movie. Is it funny, is it clever? Does this have anything to do with horror slashers or romcoms? Hell if I know.
That said, it’s worth pointing out those few moments when the movie does slow down to develop the two main leads. Those rare and blessed moments in the third act when the masks drop and the leads are allowed to be more than shrill archetypes. Even better, the characters have sincere and thoughtful discussions about their emotional hangups and what romance really means to them. A welcome change of pace, elegantly played by Holt and Gooding.
Incidentally, the third act is also where the “horror slasher” element picks up in a big way. We get some nicely brutal and bloody kills in the third act, along with some clever and nicely suspenseful set pieces. Makes me wonder how the film might’ve turned out if the filmmakers had gone with a horror/romantic dramedy instead of going full-tilt comedy.
Movies like Heart Eyes are the reason why I don’t do ratings in my reviews. The film’s approach to comedy didn’t work for me — I personally found it too brainless and annoying to be any fun — but I can understand the appeal. If you’re the kind of person who hates romcoms with a fiery passion, you might find something to laugh at here, unless maybe the film only offers more of what you hate.
Ultimately, I respect the film far more than I like it. I can see what the filmmakers were going for here, I can certainly appreciate taking such a bold swing for a genre-blender, and I’m not 100 percent convinced either way as to whether they succeeded. It’s a step up from Love Hurts, I’ll grant the filmmakers that much.
This one’s a rental recommendation at best.