Horror films have become love letters to emotional trauma. From villains to prey, tragic backstories are mandatory — and what once felt like sweet empathy now smacks of artificial saccharine. Refreshingly, “Heart Eyes,” directed by Josh Ruben, is a flip throwback to a time when killers were creeps and victims were chum. A Valentine’s Day massacre in which PDA leads to public executions, it’s got decent gags, middling scares and a rationale sloppier than two dogs sharing a strand of spaghetti. As date night fare, it’ll do.
The script, by Phillip Murphy, Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon (that last one directed the playfully vicious “Happy Death Day”), keeps its tongue stabbed through the cheek. “Heart Eyes” has two goals: satirize romantic comedies and squeeze the dregs from slasher clichés. For three Februaries in a row, the still-at-large Heart Eyes Killer, so named for emoji-shaped holes in a mask, has brutally murdered couples in Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle, where this film is set.
But beyond pat-downs at candlelit restaurants, no one seems to take the threat that seriously — and the movie doesn’t either. The chase scenes are shot with cool colors and shadows, but the tension vaporizes soon as you realize that the killer can pop up anywhere, untethered by logic or physics. The horror mechanics are so chintzy that they almost feel like they’re daring the audience to call their bluff, like a lazy boyfriend who fobs off a box of 99-cent candy hearts as an ironic joke, not a last-minute gift.
Our heroine Ally (Olivia Holt) is safely single. Her bad luck starts when she has a Nora Ephron-style meet-cute with a charming new co-worker, Jay (Mason Gooding), her perfectly scripted soulmate. Ally and Jay’s rom-com caricature is the cleverest subplot in the movie — the pair are heightened Hallmark Channel ingenues who like fiddly coffee orders, coordinated plaids and the same shade of taupe. They even have the exact same job: marketing for a jewelry company. Yet by the laws of Hollywood fiction, Ally finds Jay obnoxious.
After their boss (Michaela Watkins, tyrannical and funny) demands the two partner up for an overnight rush job, fate has thrust these colleagues together on the worst possible night. Scampering around to save their careers and their necks, they make a relatively winning twosome. Holt, a forceful and likable presence, charges through her scenes irate that she’s risking her life to sell blood diamonds. Gooding’s Jay is more vulnerable. “These muscles were not made for violence,” he huffs. “They were made for cuddling.”
This is the kind of throw-everything-at-the-screen parody for which you can imagine a writers’ room whiteboard-listing every movie it wants to lampoon. (Even the score has brief palpitations of Bernard Herrmann.) Ally is in trouble at the office because her latest engagement-ring commercial glamorizes the grisly deaths in “Romeo + Juliet” and “Titanic” — a bad look during an actual rampage. (The internet is so outraged by her insensitivity they want her to, uh, die.) Meanwhile, Gigi Zumbado, playing Ally’s best friend, rat-a-tats through a hilarious monologue of dating advice that accidentally-on-purpose cites a dozen movie titles. With the entrance of a duo of detectives named Zeke Hobbs (Devin Sawa) and Jeanine Shaw (Jordana Brewster), it even acknowledges 2019’s “The Fast and the Furious” spin-off bromance “Hobbs & Shaw.”
Watching Ally and Jay bicker about work while dodging blades, the movie’s one big idea beams in all-caps: “His Girl Friday the 13th.” (And that’s before they dash through a drive-in that just so happens to be playing the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell screwball classic.) The love-and-carnage combination makes some sense. The divorced colleagues in “His Girl Friday” re-canoodle while freeing a murderer; the couples in “Friday the 13th” have sex and then die. At one point, Grant even promises his ex-wife, “I’d kill you if you ever worked for anybody else.” Swoon!
Valentine’s Day might be the most cutthroat, derided celebration on the planet. Even sentimentalists may secretly prefer Thanksgiving. Partnered people begrudge the pressure; single people resent the condescension. Here, the first couple to get offed have designed their engagement for social-media likes. Their whole romance looks like it’s for show: the massive floral backdrop, the performative strawberry feeding, the fiancée who knows every word of her beau’s “surprise” proposal.
There’s glee in watching influencers get it. (Take that, phonies.) But everyone is at least a little insincere, even the killer, whose mocking arrangements of rose petals and dismembered organs resemble a high school promposal. Ally and Jay are both sarcastic, too — their best lines are muttered under their breaths — and their repartee becomes more interesting than the bloody theatrics. We get so invested in their fledgling chemistry that it’s almost a disappointment when they have to stop flirting and run for their lives.
We waste a lot of the movie trying to figure out what the Heart Eyes Killer wants. Is this secret slayer a cynic who hates the love that Valentine’s Day stands for, or a purist who hates the commericalized extravagance it’s become? Don’t bother caring why couples get murdered. When a motivation is finally revealed, it’s sillier than the Son of Sam claiming his doggie made him do it. There are even too many signature weapons: Cupid-approved metal arrows are great, so why fuss with a knife and a tire iron and an industrial grape press?
I guess the randomness suits a spoof where plot beats seem to have been decided by throwing darts at a board. The less we care about the story, the more our attention shifts to the sound mix, which oddly enough, winds up the star of the show. Noisy background characters, even people who are barely onscreen, make themselves heard whenever the film itself has to check off another trope. In one scene in a van’s front seat, Ally and Jay bond over how their parental role models ruined their love lives. But their therapy session is deliberately drowned out by the squeals of a nameless naked couple romping in the back. Got it, we’re not here to get serious — and as the overbearing moans make us wonder if they mean pleasure or pain, it’s a cheeky reminder that there would be no la petite mort without la mort.
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