Review: HEART EYES

 by Rob DiCristino

Two movies in one! Neither of them good!


Two movies in one! Neither of them good!

The opening sequence of Heart Eyes makes its audience a promise: As the titular masked killer dispatches the world’s most nauseating couple during their carefully-staged proposal — one of them using a vineyard’s grape-crushing hydraulic press — director Josh Ruben sets up a self-aware, blood-splattered genre pastiche that aims to do for the rom-com what Happy Death Day did for the time loop movie or Little Shop of Horrors did for the musical. Horror-comedies are nothing new, of course, but there’s certainly something novel about the idea of a crossbow-toting psychopath ripping through an assortment of unsuspecting Instagram models as they Meet Cute, misunderstand, break up, and sprint across airport terminals hoping to reunite just in the nick of time. It’s the kind of four-quadrant premise that studios salivate over, one designed to bring in both the date-night normie couples and the genre-savvy Letterboxd crowd. All it takes to pull this off is clever screenwriting, inventive kills, and a pair of lovers you’d actually want to see fight their way to a happy ending.

But instead of all that, we’ve got Heart Eyes, a movie so lackluster, interminable, and tonally rudderless that it becomes impossible to tell whether or not it’s even in on its own jokes. Our lead is Ally (Olivia Holt), a twenty-something copywriter who’s decided she’s done with love after a recent breakup. She’s closed off! She’s bulletproof! She’s better off alone, she tells her best friend (Gigi Zumbado), especially as the Heart Eyes Killer prepares for his annual Valentine’s Day murder spree. But wouldn’t you know it, she’s just been paired up for a new campaign with a gorgeous and sensitive freelancer (nu-Scream’s Mason Gooding as Jay) whose persistent charm and washboard abs threaten to change her mind. But when their V-Day “not-a-date” work meeting is interrupted by the Heart Eyes Killer — “We’re not a couple!” they shout at the lumbering leviathan, a bit of foreshadowing sure to set off alarms among the theater’s more discerning morons — Ally must shift into Final Girl mode to escape the HEK, clear Jay’s name, and save this Valentine’s Day for couples everywhere.

On paper, this should work. Slashers and rom-coms are so inherently trope-heavy that screenwriters Christopher Landon, Phillip Murphy, and Michael Kennedy (two of whom are veterans of Paranormal Activity, It’s a Wonderful Knife, and Freaky) should be able to mix and match story beats at will, peppering in some comedy and periodic ultraviolence. And it’s true that Heart Eyes leans on the fourth wall for a few funny gags and indulges itself with some decent gore, including a goopy “slow beheading” in the last act. The problem is that it can’t ever seem to decide which beats are tongue-in-cheek and which it’s playing sincerely. There are times when Ally and Jay are self-conscious cliches, openly inviting the audience to notice the artifice behind their terrible dialogue, and then there are other times when we’re asked to authentically invest in their budding relationship. Sometimes both happen at once! Their “tragic backstory” monologues, for example, are exchanged in the front of a van while its owners have loud, obnoxious sex in the back. That may play funny in Scary Movie, but I thought we were supposed to care about these people?

So while Heart Eyes may know the tropes, it has no idea how to deploy — or subvert — them effectively. This proves lethal when it pivots to a disastrous secret identity reveal sequence that, among other sins, goes on longer than the goddamn Brutalist. Critics were explicitly told not to spoil the ending — believe me, it couldn’t matter less —but suffice it to say that any twists the screenplay thinks it’s pulling off land with a thud because the audience is so tonally lost. Heart Eyes simply isn’t smart enough to understand what Shaun of the Dead, Hatchet, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, and other genre-bending horror movies do so well: You have to be the thing before you can comment on the thing. You can’t talk down to a genre and then expect your audience to invest in a story that uses it. Honestly, all this is assuming that Heart Eyes is actually trying to weaponize the genres the way I’m giving it credit for doing; it’s so poorly constructed that it’s impossible to give it the benefit of any doubt. After all, this is a movie that introduces Detectives Hobbs and Shaw (Devon Sawa and Jordanna Brewster) and then slams on the brakes so everyone can call out the reference.

It’s always risky to come down against a horror movie online, especially one from a pseudo-indie production company like Divide/Conquer (Cam, M3GAN, Totally Killer). Genre communities are protective of their identities and guarded about their self-worth, so any suggestion that one of its products might be blemished is usually met with backlash, dismissal, or an insistence that those of us ignorant or illiterate enough to criticize the film will one day recognize it for the secret masterpiece it actually is. And I get it. I do. Art gives us definition. Identity. For horror fans, championing a new slasher like Heart Eyes is akin to championing ourselves. We want these things to be great. We want to be rewarded for our devotion to the form. We want to encourage the filmmakers who are keeping our childhoods alive. But maybe we should value ourselves enough not to celebrate uninspired pretenders like Heart Eyes just because they’re what’s being put in front of us. Good horror is hard. Good comedy is hard. Good genre exploration is hard. Good movies are hard. They should be. You deserve that. Don’t forget it.

Heart Eyes hits U.S. Theaters on February 7th.