Heart Eyes (2025) | Review
Ever wished someone would take every saccharine Valentine’s Day rom-com and put it through a meat grinder? Well, horror fans, your perverse prayers have been answered. Heart Eyes is what happens when You’ve Got Mail has a fever dream after binge-watching the entire Scream franchise, and honestly? It’s a match made in slasher heaven.
Director Josh Ruben serves up a deliciously deranged cocktail where instead of meet-cutes, we get meat-cuts, courtesy of the Heart-Eyes Killer (H.E.K.), whose emoji-inspired mask is simultaneously the dumbest and most brilliant thing since Ghost Face hit speed dial. This masked menace has been turning PDAs into DOAs for three years running, armed with an arsenal that would make a Renaissance Faire weapons dealer blush – we’re talking crossbows, kukris, and yes, even a wine press (because nothing says romance like getting crushed like a grape).
Olivia Holt shines as Ally, our cynical leading lady who fled med school because she couldn’t handle blood (oh, the irony!) and now sells jewelry with commercials so depressing they make Titanic look like a feel-good romp. Enter Mason Gooding as Jay, the human equivalent of a golden retriever in business casual, whose perfectly imperfect crooked teeth somehow make him more attractive – a trick straight out of the rom-com playbook that the movie knows exactly what it’s doing with.
The film skillfully skewers every trope it can get its hands on, from the mandatory wacky best friend (Gigi Zumbado, stealing scenes like they’re unattended purses) to the comically evil boss (Michaela Watkins, barking orders with a side of actual death threats). And when Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster show up as detectives literally named Hobbs and Shaw, you know the writers are having more fun than a serial killer in a speed-dating scenario.
What makes Heart Eyes work is how it treats both its horror and romance with equal parts reverence and irreverence. The kills are genuinely gruesome – this isn’t your PG-13 slasher lite – while the budding romance between our leads feels authentically awkward, like two people trying to flirt while running from certain death (which, to be fair, they are). The script, penned by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy, keeps its tongue firmly pierced through its cheek, delivering one-liners sharper than H.E.K.’s throwing knives.
The film does stumble slightly in its final act, tacking on an additional sequence that feels more Scream derivative than homage, and the killer’s ultimate motivation is about as substantial as a candy heart message. But by then, you’re having too much fun watching these rom-com archetypes try to survive a slasher movie to really care.
Heart Eyes is exactly what happens when someone looks at both Nicholas Sparks and Michael Myers and thinks, “Yeah, these two crazy kids should get together.” It’s a love letter written in blood to both genres, understanding that at their core, both horror and romance run on the same fuel: heightened emotions and the constant threat that everything could end in tears – though in this case, those tears might be because someone just got impaled with Cupid’s arrow. Ouch.
For horror fans tired of trauma-based terror and romance fans exhausted by saccharine sweetness, “Heart Eyes” offers a refreshingly bloody alternative to both. It’s the perfect date movie – assuming you and your date have a healthy appreciation for creative kills and the understanding that sometimes, love hurts. Really, really hurts.
