Josh Ruben's novelty horror item Heart Eyes owes its existence to two factors: one, the studios looking to expand the run of date-specific genre films kickstarted by the modestly profitable Thanksgiving and Violent Night; and two, Valentine's Day happened to fall over an opening weekend in 2025. Ruben and a small unit of writers (notably Happy Death Day's Christopher Landon) offer a comic slasher organised around a loveless ghoul who uses the 24 hours of February 14 to carry out his own personal purge on couples, cutting short a countryside proposal in the prologue by firing Cupid's arrow through the skull of the groom-never-to-be and pursuing the latter's sweetheart into a winery's pulping machine. Thereafter, it's an exercise in trying to square the distinct YA audiences for horror and the romcom. It gets gory - indeed, 18-rated gory - with knowing references to earlier slasher landmarks; but then much of the blood gets splashed over Nancy Meyers-like aspirational interiors, the soundtrack harbours Train and David Gray (be very afraid), and we're set to watching a relationship growing between cynical junior advertising exec Ally (Olivia Holt), subject of an early makeover sequence, and her altogether smiley office rival Jay (Mason Gooding), our responses thereafter alternating between awws and ewws.
It's likely Paramount identified this as a potential franchise to run alongside the Scream reboots (in which Gooding featured), but at this point the studio isn't exactly committed: the budget's on the lower side, the shoot's been farmed out to New Zealand passing for Seattle, and crucially we're short on familiar faces, which results in last-reel bathos as the killer is unmasked as a character you've barely registered played by some rando you half-remember from something else. It's no Scream; it's barely a gasp. Minor pleasures include Michaela Watkins, attempting a cross between Dolly Parton and Cruella de Vil as Ally's most demanding client; the likable leads are functional stand-ins for the intended audience, although it's telling that when the killer targets a drive-in around the halfway point, the eyes are most forcefully drawn to Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, real stars in a proper movie, as opposed to something as throwaway and frankly as straight-to-streaming as Heart Eyes looks. Watchable enough in the way a two-part monster-of-the-week TV episode would be, but also clinching proof that the horror bar has been raised significantly elsewhere in recent months: there's a lot of artificial sweetener in this ketchup, leaving it more successful as an undemanding date movie than it is as a scary movie.
Heart Eyes is now playing in selected cinemas.
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