Fall in Love with the Slasher Romance Heart Eyes

In Scream and its sequels, the slasher-movie characters couldn’t suppress their own knowledge of slasher movies – couldn’t even, in the first film, stop watching Halloween as a masked killer terrorized their own social circle. In Heart Eyes, which shares a star with the recent Scream sequels and a little spirit with the original, the characters instead watch His Girl Friday. They recognize it, which is impressive for their twentysomething cohort, though their exact degree of familiarity is harder to suss out; they don’t seem to notice, for example, that both times it appears in the wrong aspect ratio. Similarly, the filmmakers behind Heart Eyes may not have fully absorbed the creative lessons of that Howard Hawks classic, namely that rapid-fire dialogue rooted in breathless oneupsmanship can as romantic as a steamy clinch. When it comes time for Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), nominally coworkers and possibly rivals, to engage in banter, they don’t disguise their true intentions with killer witticisms. They just explain their philosophies of love (Jay is a true believer; Ally is not) and, later, the backstories that inform them. (In the words of They Came Together: “That’s the point of view that I represent.”)

Then again, it behooves them to be a bit more direct – because Ally and Jay are in a slasher movie, too. The Heart Eyes Killer, so-called for the heart-shaped eye-holes in his creepy face-covering mask, has previously stalked the greater metro areas of Boston and Philadelphia on previous Valentine’s Days. Now he’s made his (or her, one cop points out) way to Seattle, where Ally works in advertising and Jay arrives for a freelance assist with a flailing campaign (which Ally happens to have created). The killer only targets couples, which should leave Ally and Jay off the hook. But a very rom-com misunderstanding puts them in the killer’s crosshairs. (He fires arrows, Cupid-style, though he’s also fine working with knives or whatever else is handy.)

Heart Eyes is a murder-mystery slasher, where the masked killer is obviously human and almost everyone is a suspect. Scream didn’t invent that story hook but did briefly popularize it in the late ’90s and early ’00s, an era that Heart Eyes eagerly evokes by casting Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster as Seattle police working the Heart Eyes Killer case. Neither of them were actually in the likes of Valentine or Urban Legend; she was in The Faculty and the prequel to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, while he was in Final Destination (and remains a Scream King to this day on the Chucky TV series). Even so, their deadpan reactions to the grim crime scenes are priceless.

All of my nitpicking risks about filmographies and aspect ratios risks making Heart Eyes sound imprecise. But director Josh Ruben, who previously made the very funny horror-comedy-whodunit hybrid Werewolves Within, knows exactly what he’s doing. This is not a horror-comedy where the “jokes” are just a bunch of blasé non-reactions to gory demises, though some of those do serve as sight gags. This is a genuinely romantic comedy that twines the heart-fluttering mishaps of that genre with the scrambling, sweaty energy of evading a deranged slasher. Both genres benefit from proper framing, metaphorically and physically; Ruben loves to juice a gag by placing (or removing) a character from the frame, by keeping certain voices off-screen at key moments, by blurring the line between jump-scare and background gag. Werewolves Within obsessively arranged and rearranged its ensemble throughout a cabin; Heart Eyes has fewer main players for much of its runtime, but it’s blocked with similar care, and cut together with knife-sharp comic timing. Instead of nagging at the audience to laugh at its irreverence, the jokes and oddball references are allowed to pop through at odder, funnier intervals between the splatter. The broad outline of the movie is unpredictable, as so many rom-coms and horror movies are; moment to moment, though, Heart Eyes keeps surprising with its ingenuity.

Gooding and Holt benefit from this seamless genre-blending; they’re allowed to play their characters sincerely without coming across like drips. Holt, whose cheeks have been made to look especially rosy and Valentine-ready, believably hesitates to open up to an imploring, sweetly dapper Gooding, yet the slasher circumstances keep pushing them together. The way their mutual cuteness is prioritized over screwball wit recalls turn-of-the-millennium rom-coms to match the slashers of the era, so even the weaknesses of Heart Eyes are part of its design scheme. Do Ruben and screenwriters Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy have greater thematic reasons for this design beyond that it’s the early 2000s’ turn now? Hard to say. The climax of Heart Eyes takes a brief turn for the gothic, vaguely framing compulsions for romance and murder as possible bedfellows, but the filmmakers back away from this implication. Werewolves Within has a more jaundiced outlook on relationships; Heart Eyes can’t help but swoon at the rich tradition of slashers serving as first-date fodder. It’s not especially scary, but it’s a thrill all the same.

Director: Josh Ruben
Writers: Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, Michael Kennedy
Starring: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Devon Sawa, Jordana Brewster, Gigi Zumbado
Release date: February 7, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.