Heart Eyes film poster and movie review

Movie Reviews

Heart Eyes

Reviewed by:
Luke Bonanno on January 31, 2025

Theatrical Release:
February 7, 2025

Whether as comedy or horror, "Heart Eyes'" attempts to win you over feel like a chore and a bore.

Running Time97 min

RatingR

Running Time 97 min

RatingR

Josh Ruben

Michael Kennedy, Christopher Landon, Phillip Murphy

Olivia Holt (Ally), Mason Gooding (Jay), Gigi Zumbado (Monica), Jordana Brewster (Detective Janine Shaw), Devon Sawa (Detective Zeke Hobbs), Michaela Watkins (Caroline Cane)


Heart Eyes (2025)

by Luke Bonanno

Heart Eyes comes up short in all three of the genres in which it theoretically operates. As a horror movie, it is lacking in genuine thrills and any semblance of logic. As a comedy, its witless presentation offers nary a chuckle. As a romance, it is hackneyed and unconvincing.

This harebrained mash-up is penned by horror veteran Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, We Have a Ghost) and would-be up-and-comers Michael Kennedy (Landon’s co-writer on 2020’s entertaining body swap flick Freaky) and Phillip Murphy (a Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard scribe). It tells of the Heart Eyes Killer, a masked psychopath who has preyed upon couples the past two Valentine’s Days in major US metropolises while eluding authorities and identification.

This Valentine’s Day, HEK, as he is known for short, appears to be terrorizing Seattle, where our attentions are on Ally (Disney Channel alum Olivia Holt), an advertiser who’s not over a recent breakup. Ally is also struggling professionally, for her ill-timed campaign about historical lovers meeting their ends draws unfavorable comparisons to HEK’s ongoing reign of holiday terror.

I'll leave it to you to figure out how the Heart Eyes Killer got his name in the movie "Heart Eyes."

Instead of getting canned, Ally gets tasked to course correct with Jay (Mason Gooding), a handsome and charming romantic who has been flown in for damage control. The two have already met-cute in a cafe where they are shocked to discover they share the same obnoxiously specific coffee order.

You can already see how this will play out. The two butt heads at an impromptu work dinner over the notion of love and then, mistaken as a couple by HEK, they’re on the run trying to stay alive.

When done right, horror and comedy can undoubtedly work in tandem, heightening one another as you experience two distinct yet kindred types of release. Here though, Heart Eyes‘ attempts to win you over in either wheelhouse feel like a chore and a bore.

There is some promise to a prologue in which an insufferable couple’s picture-perfect vineyard marriage proposal goes from country music to wine country carnage. It’s barely connected to anything else that goes down and not, as expected, the first in a series of creative kills.

One staged kiss leaves Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) running for their lives in the Valentine's Day-themed 2025 horror movie "Heart Eyes."

This is the third and biggest film to date from director Josh Ruben, who got his start on the website CollegeHumor and has since dabbled in television, podcasting, and feature filmmaking. Ruben’s first two features — 2020’s Scare Me and 2021’s Werewolves Within — were also horror comedies. The latter opened just outside the top ten at the domestic box office on its way to a nearly $1 million worldwide gross. In horror-comedy, those modest economics can still be considered successful. The budget of Heart Eyes is unreported, but unmistakably restrained. This independent production was acquired by Paramount’s acquisition label Republic Pictures for distribution outside of North America. Here at home in the US, it’s being handled by Sony’s seasoned genre division Screen Gems.

The movie has timing on its side; arriving a weekend before Valentine’s Day while being explicitly centered on the holiday. Unusually, the closest thing to a traditional romance we get this February is Bleecker Street’s postapocalyptic Love Me, which might be expanding. The real play for that Valentine’s Day date night moviegoing money comes from Heart Eyes and Universal’s fellow R-rated Love Hurts, which applies action comedy sensibilities to the holiday.

Ruben has the nuts and bolts of a modern slasher film down pat. What he fails to do is anything that can make the movie stand out or stay with you. About as inspired as things get here is the casting of ’90s/2000s horror alums Jordana Brewster (The Faculty) and Devon Sawa (Final Destination) as partner cops named — get this — Hobbs and Shaw. The production repeatedly hopes that name-dropping other movies will earn it some credibility with film lovers. But, like everything else here, it rings hollow. The fact that young Seattle couples are shown gathering in mass for a drive-in theater’s Valentine’s Day night showing of His Girl Friday might be the most amusing thing in the movie and it amuses for how out of touch the filmmakers are with 2025 movie tastes and practices. But pretty cool that you guys know that well-loved old Cary Grant romcom?

Rarely are horror movies taken to task for lack of realism, but this movie’s news reports on the Heart Eyes Killer are so preposterously phony you can’t help but be pulled out of the narrative. Threatened suspension of disbelief might be for the best, because if you’re truly invested in the plot, you’ll be heartbroken at how haphazard and unfulfilling the killer reveals end up being.

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