Director Josh Ruben’s new horror film strikes a very particular, even peculiar tone, but it’s tons of fun. Here’s our Heart Eyes review.
Ah, Valentine’s Day. The one day a year you’re under immense pressure to be in a relationship and to show your love in very public and excessive ways.
Ally (Olivia Holt) really feels that pressure. Her ex-boyfriend has already moved on with another woman, and she’s about to be fired from her job for designing an ad campaign focusing on doomed couples – all while there’s a serial killer killing couples on Valentine’s Day. She’s paired with Jay (Mason Gooding) to work on a new campaign, but things get a little complicated when the killer goes after them.
Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes, then, is a strange film. It’s both a romantic comedy and a gruesome slasher. The combo shouldn’t work, but somehow Heart Eyes has enough endearing charm that it does. It requires you to just go with it and accept its willingness to take bits of differing genres it’s interested in. If you do so? Heart Eyes has plenty to offer.
Thankfully, Ruben and writers Phillip Murphy, Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon (who has Drop coming out in April, as director) inject the film with enough self-aware wit that Heart Eyes gets away with its cheesy romance and slightly cliched horror action. There’s not exactly anything new about Heart Eyes, but it’s so much fun, it’s easy to give it a pass for replaying familiar hits.
The gore, and there’s plenty, comes in big, bloody spurts. It’s excessive and theatrical, and you get a couple of great kills that should satisfy even the most seasoned horror hounds. The killer itself is cleverly designed, and while it’s designed to match the looks of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and the foe from My Bloody Valentine, the mask is immediately memorable and creepy in all the right ways.
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The romance angle mostly works because of the wonderful chemistry between Holt and Gooding. Their meet-cute at a coffee shop, where they both have the same, ridiculous coffee order and confer about paper straws before bumping heads is disgustingly romantic by design. Heart Eyes even dares to ask the question of what’s more disgusting: a woman being crushed to death or Valentine’s Day in general?
It might all sound like dumb fun – and for the most part, it is – but there’s a little more going on under the hood here. For most of the film, Ruben and his writers force Ally to be the hero. Gooding’s Jay is often in trouble and much less capable of handling himself than her. Horror has regularly offered us strong women who can defeat killers, but Heart Eyes puts a lot of effort into constantly reversing the generic roles of its two leads.
In an era of elevated horror, Heart Eyes is pleasingly traditional, focusing on the horror element over heavy themes. And it’s really good fun. Not all the humour works – one particularly groan-worthy joke includes a reference to Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw – but thanks to great performances from Gooding and Holt and excellent gore, I’d argue it’s a future cult classic in the making.
Heart Eyes is in UK cinemas 14th February.
