Love and death may be literature’s two greatest themes, but they make strange bedfellows in cinema. Conventionally love belongs to the romance, and death to horror, but Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes brings them together in this slasher rom com that genuinely adheres to the rules of both genres.
Wearing a mask with heart-shaped pink lights over the eyes, a serial killer know as ‘Heart Eyes’ has been operating cross-country for years, targeting lovers on Valentine’s Day. Recently dumped and cynical about love, Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt) ought to be immune from this assailant – until she is partnered with the dreamy Jay Simmons (Mason Gooding) to work on a jewelry advertising campaign, and as they pull an all-nighter on Valentine’s Day, the spark that, despite Ally’s denials, is obviously building between them catches the attention of a figure in a mask…
The horror here, very much of the Scream variety, including lengthy villain-sourced exposition packed into the climax, is as baroque as it is nasty, but while the leads’ performances are winning, their characters and the chemistry between them never stop seeming contrived and artificial, perhaps in keeping with the general weightlessness of the romance genre.
A massacre sequence set at a drive-in cinema screening Howard Hawks’ screwball romance His Girl Friday (1940) nails the film’s status as a reflexive hall of mirrors, built from the contrary elements of very different kinds of movies. Whether all those influences come together in a happy marriage or a merely dysfunctional relationship rooted in shared trauma as much as love is left for the viewer to decide.
strap: Josh Ruben’s rom com slasher seeks the sweet spot between eros and thanatos in a knowing, nasty clash of genres
