For a while, Heart Eyes is about as stuck on what it wants to say about love as those guys on Hinge who only seem interested in talking about beer, that one trip they took abroad five years ago, and The Office. Bearing the tagline “Romance is dead,” director Josh Ruben’s slasher/rom-com mash-up opens with a brutal, comical take-down of Instagram-perfect couples: a young woman’s carefully manipulated proposal is interrupted (after she scolds her boyfriend for putting the ring in her food, and he lashes out at the photographer he hired to capture the moment for failing to do his job) by an attack by the Heart Eyes Killer, a masked serial killer who—as an assemblage of news clips relay in short order— travels to a different city every Valentine’s Day and murders couples out celebrating. His kills are creative and gnarly, gleeful explosions of sticky goo that any gore-head would love, and his motive points toward the cynicism that typically takes over the single half of the population around the holiday. That’s why it’s so surprising when the story (written by horror/comedy veterans Christopher Landon, Michael Kennedy, and Phillip Murphy) not only begins to turn so heavily in the direction of a typical romantic comedy, but also wears its genre influences so obviously on its sleeve. This is no more apparent than a late-film confrontation with Heart Eyes set at a drive-in theatre showing His Girl Friday, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell’s faces beaming down from the giant screen on the scores of happy couples below them, their rat-a-tat dialogue echoing around the leads as they attempt to evade the killer. The 1940 film by Howard Hawks, in which Grant and Russell play former journalist spouses thrown back together to untangle a murder case before Russell’s Hildy Johnson retires from the business and remarries, is a classic of the screwball comedy, a subgenre of the romantic comedy that accents the absurdity of love more than it succumbs to swooning romance.
That Heart Eyes is trying to capture a similar spirit is apparent in the film long before this explicit reference occurs, when the story cuts from the killer’s intro to a coffee shop meet-cute shared by the film’s generically attractive protagonists, Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding). Their connection over their shared weird coffee order ends as awkwardly as it picks up later, when it turns out that Jay is the freelance marketing guru hired by the Seattle-based jewelry company Ally works for to salvage a controversial ad campaign involving doomed couples that Ally (still reeling from a recent break-up) designed. Their Valentine’s day-long feud culminates in a train wreck of a maybe work meeting/maybe date and an encounter that leads the Heart Eyes Killer, stalking other couples nearby, to believe that they are an item, and make them his next target.
After its shaky opening, Hearts Eyes really takes off after this, hitting on an impressive amount of genre beats while rarely feeling tired: a dominant female lead, a battle of the sexes, an argumentative pair forced by circumstance to work together, constantly protesting that they aren’t a couple even as their chemistry apparent to seemingly everyone except them says otherwise. That’s not to mention its myriad other allusions to rom-com classics, from Ally’s pre-date shopping spree to her best friend Monica (Gigi Zumbado) name-dropping everything from Notting Hill to Love, Actually in her climatic “go get him” monologue. Holt and Gooding may be no Grant and Russell, but they do genuinely spark off each other, and the serious, intimate moments in which they slowly build trust are nicely spaced between pratfalls and the clumsy encounters that pull them back together every time it seems they are about to part ways. Their scenes only don’t hit when the dialogue they have to parrot rankles; unfortunately, many of the writers’ attempts at humor, particularly involving the colorful ensemble of supporting players like Ally’s Miranda Priestly-lite boss Crystal (Michaela Watkins) and the pair of detectives investigating the killer (played by Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster), fall flat (I’m sure they’re just playing with franchise regular Brewster, but does the 2019 Fast & Furious spinoff Hobbs & Shaw possess enough cultural cachet to warrant a reference? I don’t think so). Meanwhile, the slasher side of the plot, while still existing as the impetus for Jay and Ally staying together, feels unscary and increasingly inane as the killer takes a backseat to the central love story.
But even the final unveiling of the killer’s identity leans in the direction of an act of love rather than an act in opposition to it. It may be a subpar distillation of its references, but despite its stumbles, Heart Eyes ends up being oddly endearing, and an entertaining seasonal watch that accomplishes just enough to win over horror and romance fans alike— and maybe some of those skeptics who typically glance at Valentine’s Day with a sneer.
Heart Eyes is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 97 minutes. Rated R.
Katie at the Movies 