Heart Eyes 2025 Movie Review
Finally, a flick that can please every Valentine’s Day moviegoer: those who hate the lovey-dovey holiday, those who adore it, those who want romance in their Valentine’s Day movies and those who prefer their gushing more gory. Every section of that particular Venn diagram can come away satisfied from “Heart Eyes,” a fun and irreverent seasonal slasher from director Josh Ruben.
Writers Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy (who co-wrote with Phillip Murphy) are the brains behind some of the most entertaining high-concept horror flicks of the past few years, including the “Groundhog Day”-inspired “Happy Death Day,” and the “Freaky Friday” riff “Freaky.” They apply their genre mashup skills to “Heart Eyes,” delivering a classic ‘90s-style slasher remixed as a rom-com, while paying homage to the greats along the way.
Every good rom-com has to have killer chemistry at the center, from Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night,” to Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday,” to Meg Ryan and just about anyone. Fortunately, “Heart Eyes” has Mason Gooding and Olivia Holt, two veterans of recent teen horror hits (the “Scream” sequels for him; “Totally Killer” for her). The pair have a crackling charm together, and while there’s a certain winky-ness to these kinds of self-referential genre exercises, they know to play it straight, both the flirtation and the fright.
Holt is Ally, Gooding is Jay; they meet-cute over their very specific identical coffee order, and then later at a work meeting, discovering they’ve been pitted against each other on an advertising campaign for a jewelry designer (a hilarious Michaela Watkins in the funniest, and most outright comedic role). Their bumbling, burgeoning connection is set against a series of slayings accredited to the “Heart Eyes Killer,” a serial murderer who has targeted happy couples in various cities around the United States every Valentine’s Day. Ally and Jay never assume they’ll be targeted as they’re not a couple — but HEK (and the audience) can plainly see the sizzle between them, and they team up to fight off the knife-wielding maniac (who sports a mask with glowing eye holes in the shape of hearts, like the emoji).
The film follows a classic screwball comedy formula — prickly rivals fall for each other over the course of a crazy adventure — with the kind of Scooby-Doo twist that usually comes at the end of a slasher movie, wherein the killer is unmasked, and they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids, who happen to be falling in love.There may be a few plot wrinkles, and the mystery isn’t much to write home about. But that’s not really what’s important about “Heart Eyes,” in which Gooding proves himself to be a very funny leading man, Holt a steely, yet vulnerable final girl. The lore isn’t all that compelling, but their love story is.
While Ruben delivers some impressively bloody and innovative kills, “Heart Eyes” is a love letter to rom-coms, with references to “Clueless,” “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” the aforementioned “His Girl Friday” and many, many more, name-checked in a cheeky monologue by Ally’s best friend Monica (Gigi Zumbado). It is also, weirdly, a love letter to the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, with Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa (famously of “Final Destination”) playing a pair of detectives named Hobbs and Shaw.
“Heart Eyes” reminds us that stories of love and death have always been intertwined in the popular imagination. Ally’s (misguided) Valentine’s Day ad campaign features doomed love stories like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Titanic” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” There are elements of these famed love stories woven throughout “Heart Eyes,” from the team work to the willingness to sacrifice oneself for your love’s survival. Grand declarations and life-or-death pathos is just as much a part of these high-stakes narratives as the sparkling banter and longing looks. Love and death are inextricably intertwined in a symbiotic relationship, and “Heart Eyes” makes that manifest, with wit, good cheer and plenty of blood.
