Without going into a belabored history lesson, the late 1990s saw the beginning of a slasher resurgence, particularly ones made by big studios, stacked with recognizable and hot casts, and given a glossy finish not always found in the original slasher cycle. It was the sort of begrudging mainstream acceptance a lot of horror fans could get behind; Hollywood didn’t quite respect the genre — apart from its profitability — but they did make the hell out of the movies. That important yet fleeting era was lightning in a bottle, and recapturing it today has been tricky. For those still waiting for a newer slasher to channel the past as well as carve out its own identity, they can now feast their eyes on Heart Eyes, Josh Ruben’s symbiotic union of romance and horror.
What looks to be another standard holiday-themed hack-’em-up is more singular than its basic motif lets on. Unlike past Valentine’s Day-set slashers, Heart Eyes throws itself at the holiday, silly as that may be. Essentially this story is a twisted rom-com with a high body-count, and once we’re past the delightfully nasty opening kills — a sinister mockery of overdone marriage proposals — that strange formula plays out with few hitches.
Olivia Holt is this movie’s take on the “single working woman who has given up on love before it gives up on her” trope. And after a pitiful excuse for a meet-cute, Holt’s character Ally realizes the object of her woeful flirting is now something of a co-worker. Mason Gooding plays Jay, the handsome freelancer who’s in town to clean up Ally’s big mess at work. Yet when he tries to trick Ally into a romantic Valentine’s date, their night goes from bad to nightmare once the two land on the Heart Eyes Killer’s (HEK) radar.
From there Heart Eyes transforms into an exciting one-nighter with solid resting points to expound on the more urgent plot — can Ally and Jay work things out? At first the onus seems to be on Ally, whose hang-ups about love could challenge even a hopeless romantic like Jay. This seems to play into old-fashioned rom-com clichés where one half of the relationship has too much baggage and the other doesn’t have enough. Luckily, though, Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy’s script isn’t finger-pointing here. It’s pretty easy to see how much the director and writers all care about their characters.
The lovey-dovey stuff here is undeniably cute, but slasher fans came for the red stuff — and I’m not talking about candy and roses. Heart Eyes is bound to make its audience squeal, on account of the lead’s dazzling chemistry and adorable moments together, but the movie also has a mean streak. From the outset, Heart Eyes is intent on being as brutal as possible with how lovers die at the hands of the namesake. Tears may form during the emotional bits, however, some set-pieces here are squirm-worthy. The effectiveness of these gory fatalities vary from one to another, on account of how the scene plays out tone-wise. For the most part, the humor and horror bounce off one another almost effortlessly. More so than other endeavors in recent years, I might say.
How exactly Heart Eyes hones in on the spirit of second-trend slashers can be most detected in the run-ins with the antagonist, especially once the mask comes off and the surviving players are trapped in a gothic and intimate enclosure. It’s one that immediately brings to mind the decadent and deranged endings of Scream 2, Urban Legend and Valentine. Stephen Murphy’s cinematography is formidable in this movie’s outcome, not to mention that gorgeous merry-go-round sequence.
It may be tempting to save Heart Eyes for only annual revisits, on account of its story timestamp, but there is also a lot here to make those returns worthwhile. And down the line, I could easily see this becoming a point of inspiration for that inevitable next wave of slashers.
Heart Eyes is now playing in theaters.
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