It’s a good moment for whacked-out horror. Heart Eyes joins Crumb Catcher, The Rule of Jenny Pen, Bring Her Back, Together, Gazer and The Monkey, to name just the ones I’ve seen in the last few weeks. Heart Eyes is less icky than some, more larky than others – it’s Whedon-esque, Buffy-like, horror done with a smirk.
So, very referential? Yes, indeedy. The pre-credits sequence sets us up nicely for what’s going to play out. A sweet young-lovers proposal scene. He’s going to pop the question. She’s trembling with anticipation. But instead of the two of them walking off into the sunset together, he winds up with an arrow in the head and she ends up compressed in a crusher.
And off we got into a story full of nice young things being killed by a masked killer who only strikes on Valentine’s Day. The Heart Eyes Killer, the media are soon calling him. Or HEK for short.
Enter the real stars of the film. Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), who meet-cute one morning at a coffee place before heading off to work. They head off separately to work, where she discovers that he’s the new hotshot in town and what’s more he’s being lined up for her job. But never mind that, here comes the HEK, who has selected Ally and Jay as this year’s Valentine’s Day targets, having divined from his hidden vantage point that they are lovers. But they’re not lovers, they vociferously object. In fact they barely know each other. But the HEK, romantic murderous old fool that he is, has spotted something that neither Ally nor Jay has realised…
The film starts at this point, after around 40 minutes of getting-to-know-yous, also introducing the two cops on the HEK case. Hobbs and Shaw (one for Fast and Furious fans) are played by Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster. Brewster an F&F refugee, so that’s funny, but she’s also a holdover from The Faculty, a key text of 1990s horror, and Sawa is probably most associated, even after all these years, with Final Destination, another motherlode from the Clinton era.
Once it gets up to operating temperature the movie essentially consists of one scene after the other of the HEK almost but not quite getting to Ally and Jay – no other couple will satisfy him, it seems – with cops Hobbs and Shaw always arriving on the scene late, to find mayhem and more dead bodies.
Director Josh Ruben says he wanted to catch the Wes Craven vibe for the horror bits and Nora Ephron for the romance. Mission accomplished, I’d say. From the I Know What You Did scher-wing sound that the HEK’s blade makes to Jay Wadley’s score of string-driven anxiety clearly aiming at 1990s horror, and the ingenuity behind the slaying, Craven, Whedon, Kevin Williamson, Drew Goddard and their ilk are all invoked.
So is Ephron, in the When Harry Met Sally characters (reversed) of Jay and Ally. He the sort of metrosexual who does yoga and is intuitive, he says, a romantic. She’s the hard-nosed one, who thinks romance is for losers and is “a farce… regurgitated fairytale bullshit”. So of course they’re going to fall in love.
There is a montage dressing sequence and the action eventually shifts to a fairground because Ruben knows which 1990s bases to touch. Thanks to high energy direction, he keeps the comedy, romance and horror in balance, which is a feat. Holt and Gooding are, you know, nice kids and we wish Ally and Jay well in their future together, should they ever get there. But Brewster and Sawa are funnier, playing Hobbs and Shaw straight down the line – by making no nods whatsoever to comedy they make the joke funnier.
It’s good in exactly the same way the films it’s aping are good. Fun. Watch and laugh and pretend to scream.
Heart Eyes – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
