Heart Eyes | 2025
A girl and a boy have a meet-cute in a coffee shop. Their orders get confused; there's a lot of awkward banter and clumsy head bumping. It's a tale as old as time, or at least a tale as old as Hollywood. What makes this story unique is that once the burgeoning couple leaves the coffee shop, they are pursued by a knife-wielding serial killer determined to put a bloody damper on their Valentine's Day.
Heart Eyes takes elements of romantic comedies and slasher horror to create something, if not entirely unfamiliar, at least cleverly entertaining. The film's central couple, Aly (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), are actually unwitting co-workers who find themselves thrust into the web of the infamous Heart Eyes Killer - a masked maniac who stalks couples on Valentine's Day and murders them in ingenuously gruesome ways. There's only one problem - Aly and Jay aren't actually a couple (well...not yet), a fact that, despite their constant insistence, seems totally irrelevant to the bloodthirsty Heart Eyes.
Holt and Gooding make an attractive pair. While slasher send-ups are nothing new, Heart Eyes is a charming romantic comedy and a terrific horror film that successfully parodies elements of both. It's a bit like Scream meets 10 Things I Hate About You, as the dueling protagonists slowly fall in love when they are tossed headfirst into a high-stakes horror movie neither one of them asked to be in. Once the killer's true identity is revealed, the ultimate motivation doesn't make a lot of sense given the Valentine's Day setting, but it's hard not to fall for the film's good-natured vibe, which pokes gentle fun at everything from familiar genre tropes to Gen Z social anxieties.
It has a keen awareness of both its genres, a likable pair of leads, and some wicked kills that will likely leave both gore-hounds and couples looking for some V-Day romance satisfied. Heart Eyes may not break any new ground, but it treads familiar ground lovingly without overstaying its welcome.
