Heart Eyes is a sparklingly fiendish delight, a funny and winning combination of the best and cringiest characteristics of modern romantic comedies and slasher films. It’s a perfect blend of holiday-themed masked killer fare and the fast-patter interplay of Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, all rolled up into a rippingly-paced madhouse of a chase movie. Throw in two magnetic leads – Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding – who traverse the line between romantic comedy and horror thriller with facile ease, and all you have to do is sit back and watch the sparks fly.
Co-written by Phillip Murphy and frequent collaborators Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, Heart Eyes immediately burrows in with its (somewhat disturbingly) gory prologue, where gruesome consequences are doled out to a couple focusing more on the aesthetics of their in-progress engagement than their love. This prologue is out for blood, setting us up for the kind of attack on the superficial this movie wants to launch, especially as far as Valentine’s Day is concerned. A handful of people are brutally introduced to a serial murderer – whose light-up mask has lent the “Heart Eyes Killer” moniker to the media – who’s been operating for years in disparate cities, targeting couples around and on Valentine’s Day.
We’re acclimated to the fast pace of Murphy, Landon, and Kennedy’s script and Josh Ruben’s sly direction in this opening salvo, full of punchy dialogue and witty action compounding toward one of the most graphic body explosions I’ve ever seen. Ruben makes the most out of the prologue’s winery location, with its rolling hills, semi-concealing vines, and one hell of a grape press. The suspense factor is upped, with the killer’s formidable look providing a layer of familiarity – the duster and mask worn betray nothing except for the killer’s relentless brutality. This startling (yet pointedly hilarious) pre-title sequence kicks off the latest spree in Seattle, where the news blares the killer’s history and warnings to couples everywhere to be cautious.
Ruben wisely slows things down a bit to situate us with our winsome heroine, Ally (Holt), as she’s one-half of a charming coffee shop meet-cute – the other half being Jay (Gooding), a good-looking, smooth guy who seems to know all the right things to say. Especially after a bout of Ally’s clumsiness results in him bleeding from his nose. This is the stuff that romance movies hang on – an impossibly complicated coffee order, the unplanned synchronicity between strangers, the longing looks, the wide-eyed encouragement from a friend off to the side, and the later revelation of Jay’s sudden presence in Seattle and what it means to Ally’s job – but Ruben asks his actors to play everything completely straight, which is why Heart Eyes works so well.
Every scene contains an uncomfortable truth that most romcoms would gloss over, but Ruben, Murphy, Landon, and Kennedy make sure to avoid any hint of overt parody. One slight wobble off the scant line they’ve drawn between too serious and not serious enough, and Heart Eyes becomes a Scream-like homage. Thankfully, Ruben directs his cast away from wink-wink-nudge-nudge and into more stable territory. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding’s grounding performances keep us rooted and the stakes high, as they have to navigate their working relationship, their growing attraction for each other… and the Heart Eyes Killer, who’s singled them out to be next on the chopping block.
The chase is on, and Heart Eyes takes every opportunity to wear its influences on its sleeve, but in a sly, unobtrusive way. It harks back to all eras of the romcom, from 1930’s screwball zaniness to gross-out fare to every film that featured someone running through an airport to find their lost love. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding handle their rapid-fire dialogue with spirited vigor, believably alternating between starry-eyed and aghast as each situation requires. While Holt holds down more of the bewildered, working-without-a-plan end of this couple, Gooding matches her step for step by playing the coolest guy who wants to stay assured despite his fear. True, he acts a little douchebro-y for a bit, but he eventually drops his preconceived notions, joining Ally in being real, not just throwing up façades to try to get laid.
Josh Ruben wrings maximum tension out of every setup, making us look for the long-coated, masked villain in the backgrounds of quiet scenes and paying off our anticipation of well-wrought jump scares. All the while, Holt and Gooding – along with the likes of Gigi Zumbado and ‘90s veteran actors Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster – deliver the intended pop and sizzle of the script with wild abandon, sinking themselves fully into their roles and making it okay to have a good time amid the Heart Eyes Killer’s murderous night. Humor and blood come fast and furious (you’ll see why I used those exact words) in Heart Eyes, a welcome February 14th antidote for those seeking the perfect mashup of romance and horror. It’s not much of a stretch to posit a younger Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a film like this back in the late 1980s or early ‘90s; Holt and Gooding being able to match the Hanks/Ryan chemistry is why Heart Eyes will endure as a Valentine’s Day classic for years to come.
