Recently single Ally (Olivia Holt) feeds her current feelings on romance into a bold pitch for the jewellery company she works for, focusing on doomed couples throughout the ages. This does not sit well with Ally’s boss Crystal (Michaela Watkins) who thinks the ad is in poor taste and could easily be linked to the Heart Eyes Killer, a serial wacko who has been targeting couples for the past couple of Valentine’s Days. To rescue the campaign, Ally is teamed up with hotshot pitch dude Jay (Mason Gooding), the same guy Ally literally bumped into as she stopped for coffee earlier that day.
A meeting at a restaurant to discuss strategy sees Ally and Jay bump heads in the metaphorical sense this time, and the evening looks to be ending early until Ally sees her previous boyfriend arriving with his new girlfriend. In an attempt to salvage something from the lowest point of her already crappy day, Ally pretends Jay is her new beau and makes a point of kissing him in public in front of her ex. What Ally and Jay don’t know is that the Heart Eyes killer has is watching the place and has just added them both to the kill list…
Directed by Josh Ruben, whose previous feature was Werewolves Within, and co-written/co-produced by Christopher Landon, a key creative force in a number of genre entries including the Happy Death Day movies, I went into Heart Eyes hoping for a combination of scares, slashings and snappy scripting common to those titles. I’m happy to report that this new entry into potential franchise territory does not disappoint, ditching the meta trappings of such juggernauts as Scream, but keeping the tense, gory pre-titles action and presenting a list of suspects and a rising body count, all investigated by dogged detectives Hobbs (Devon Sawa) and Shaw (Jordana Brewster). Yes, there is a joke about their surnames.
Comedy horror is a tricky one to get right, that’s for certain. Comedy horror romance is a juggling act inviting failure. However, if you set aside the bloody set pieces and frequent jump scares, Heart Eyes also works terrifically well as a romcom, giving the viewer an amusing but not overplayed meet cute and some classic initial tension between Ally and Jay before throwing various obstacles – and several bodies – in a twisted take on the usual will they, won’t they plot.
Holt is delightful as the reluctant marketing type and even more reluctant battler of a scary murdering type. Ally is given the chucklesome background of a med school dropout who changed careers due to having issues with the sight of blood. As someone who doesn’t flinch at fake claret splattering the screen, but has to fight the urge to throw up whenever I see a drop of the red stuff spilled for real, I was with her.
Gooding, fresh from being the Scream continuation’s human knife magnet, gets to step out of the supporting shadows and proves a more than capable romantic lead. In so many romcoms, his character would be utterly insufferable in act one but his performance, coupled with the writing, plays down the antagonistic aspects of a guy brought in to ostensibly fix the gaffes made by an already ridiculed and emotionally wounded Ally. There’s also the undeniable fact that he’s a very handsome chap, which should go a long way to smoothing over any issues with anyone who has accepted the mission of sitting through the nasty bits to savour this eye candy.
So, let’s take a look at those nasty bits, shot through with humour, but not skimping on some spectacular gore and various painful collisions with body parts and bladed objects. This is a film which knows the value of regular grimaces punctuating the giggles. There’s also an equal opportunity air brought to the who’s saving who of the escalating clashes between mistaken pairing and killer, and those skirmishes are played out in a variety of locations such as a carousel, a police station and a drive-in.
He may no longer be attached to Scream 7 but Christopher Landon has landed on his feet here, helming a breezy slasher which delivers a perfect balance of fun and frights, confidently mixing the sweet with the splattery. As with Wes Craven’s genre savvy opus, this has its own, potentially iconic line in slaughter chic and a similarly convoluted resolution which sets it as a standalone for the time being, but possesses the scope for what could well be a brand new horror franchise. The next incarnation of Ghostface’s ongoing spree will have to go some to match this.
Heart Eyes (2025) is on general release now.