Heart Eyes
Heart Eyes
When the "Heart Eyes Killer" strikes Seattle, a pair of co-workers pulling overtime on Valentine's Day are mistaken for a couple by the elusive couple-hunting killer. Now, they must spend the most romantic night of the year running for their lives.
rg9400 reviewedMarch 8, 2025
Heart Eyes is an interesting experiment. Part romcom and part slasher thriller, the movie tries to blend the two together to create a fun Valentine's Day horror movie. The result is fairly mixed. The killer's identity is extremely predictable, with it being very easy to figure out which ones are red herrings. When the reveal is done, it doesn't feel very gratifying and ends up actually feeling very cheesy. The set pieces actually look pretty cool with some dramatic imagery at times, but the problem is that there simply are not many of them in the movie. The reason is that the movie tries to balance its romcom genre with the horror, and those two contrasting tropes tend to result in very distinct separations within the movie. What I mean by that is that instead of being able to blend the two genres together, the approach the movie takes is to create what feels like two separate movies and alternate between them. If I had to estimate, the romcom part probably eats up more screentime as well. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding and did chuckle at times, but when the movie tried to build this relationship between the two, it just never really landed for me. It felt very much like insta-love, and we still ended up getting some half-baked backstory to try to make it feel more meaningful even though it caused the movie to come to a screeching halt. The ending really reflects how much the movie wants to be this romance even though that is its weakest element by far. I think the movie would have been a lot better had it focused more on the comedy and horror elements or if it was able to fully blend in the romance into the other two instead of keeping it so disparate. In particular, I think the movie should have had a lot more kills and setpieces because those were genuinely fun. There's some good stuff in this movie, but also a lot of really boring stuff.