'Heart Eyes' Is a Killer Box of Chocolates; You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get

If you were to trap me in a room with two doors in front of me like the Mormon girls in Heretic, scribbling “Rom-Com” on one door and “Slasher” on the other, I would always walk through the Slasher door. It’s just the way I’m built. Yes, even if I had a sinisterly grinning Hugh Grant hovering over my shoulder—I’d rather that debonair hairdo stalk me than hand me flowers. But Heart Eyes ain’t playing those games! Why should we have to (in the legendary words of Lisa Simpson’s valentine to Ralph Wiggum) choo-choo-choose? It’s 2025 and genre exists to get gleefully tossed into the blender. It’s the “Why not both?” meme in movie-form, and by gosh and by golly director Josh Ruben (Scare Me and Werewolves Within), writers Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon (Freaky), and Michael Kennedy (It’s a Wonderful Knife), and (especially) stars Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding mostly make it work.

Heart Eyes is all the best bits ground up into a movie smoothie that goes down easy—barely a whisper of gristle except where it wants the gristle. And then there’s extra gristle. With some powdered gristle on top. I’d wager it’s a hint better with the romance than it is the horror—I didn’t find it terribly terrifying at any point. But that could be I am just a grizzled old cynic a la the detectives Hobbes and Shaw (yes the joke is made) played here by grizzled old horror pros Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster. (We’re now a generation away from Final Destination and The Faculty and Heart Eyes feels very much a throwback to that era.)

But its romance that I bought into fully—it’s hard nigh impossible to not wanna get wooed by Mason Gooding! Even if he’s deranged, who cares? In a sharp suit? With that sly smile? Come on! That’s the enviable sitch Ally (Holt) finds herself in after surviving your standard rom-com meet-cute turned up to eleven, where she meets Jay (Gooding) for the first time at a coffee shop, and the two can’t stop butting heads. Literally. I think I winced more at their repeated head-bonking than I did when the random girl got exploded inside a hydraulic wine press machine in the opening scene that sets the stakes for all our beautiful young lovers—namely that every Valentine’s Day for the past several years the Heart Eyes Killer (or HEK for short) has spent February 14th butchering couples. Love is dead! Long live Love! Where is the Love, the Black-Eyed Peas scream unto oblivion???

Point being: February 14th is probably not the best time for Ally and Jay’s cute to be meeting, or their meat to be cuting, or whatever the hell it is that straight people do these days, but here we are. Cupid’s arrows (not to mention the killer’s) always find their mark, and Fate forces Ally and Jay to meet up again almost immediately following their calamitous coffee-shop encounter. And we’ve seen this set-up before too—turns out he’s the talented big city wringer brought in to her company to fix her mistakes at work after she designed a disastrous (and yet on-point-thematically!) ad-campaign that equated love with death. And so, inevitably, the two must bicker first, before the good kissy parts can get started.

Also standing in the way of the good kissy parts—the very large murderer traipsing about the town who sniffs our duo’s pheromonal chemistry out and gets to hunting them even as they insist at anyone within shrieking distance, well past the point of it being true, that they’re very much not in love. And for a killer who we’re told early on racks up an impressive body count each year, HEK sure does glom onto our combative pair with a single-mindedness that leaves that supposed proficiency in the dust; why it’s almost suspicious, it is. Like HEK might have some personal connection to or grudge with Ally and Jay themselves …?

Indeed Heart Eyes plays at the Scream shell game of “No Boyfriend Is A Safe Space!” real hard, making us side-eye Jay from the start. At one point, he says he’s going to get a massage, and in the very next scene on the news, we hear about a killing taking place in a sauna! So forth. (And I would like to interject here to the filmmakers a hearty “Shame on you!” for not giving us a scene where Mason Gooding strips down to a towel and gets a massage. What a cheat!)

It’s all in good humor, though. And Heart Eyes is chock full of that stuff—indeed it’s having so much fun and riffing on so many of the expected tropes and enjoying the silly stupid repartee between its leads so much that it never quite finds the time to be very scary. Gory, heck (or is that HEK) yes—it certainly earns its R-rating with all of the over-the-top body mangling on display. You’ll side-eye that glass of red wine at your romantic Valentine’s dinner after watching this movie, that is for certain. See it with a big crowd, hoot and holler and hold your date’s hand (or a stranger’s—no judgment here). I just doubt you’ll find HEK stalking you in your nightmares afterward. Mason Gooding’s kissy-lips, on the other hand …