First Impressions On Heart Eyes (2025)

 

By Joe Gibson

 

I am aware that 8 months after release is a little late for some “First Impressions”, but, as it is the Halloween season, I am not exactly sure I want to go through the effort of a more in depth close-read review when I could otherwise watch a lot more horror films this month (and select for review from there). And that’s really it. I don’t want to call this a review for pedantic reasons, but I still want to share my thoughts on the film. 

 

Opening in theaters February 7th of 2025, a movie equal parts romantic comedy and slasher film would have been an ideal date night scenario (for whatever reason, it underperformed with couples and did not exactly break-even), but I did not elect to see it at that time. Actually, looking over the early to mid-2025 film releases, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even go to the theater until July this year. In any case, I was excited to watch Heart Eyes. I liked Mason Gooding from his role in the Scream movies, and, back when I was in the target audience, I enjoyed I Didn’t Do It, a Disney Channel show starring Olivia Holt (the other lead of this film). I liked that show because I was a dumb kid, but for what it is worth, I Didn’t Do It was the closest thing Disney Channel had to complex metatextual storytelling in those days because each episode started in medias res and then filled in the context with semi reliable narrators, ending with a plot twist.

 

The film features Christopher Landon as producer with a writing credit, but Josh Ruben directed the movie. Landon is behind a lot of recent slasher hits and almost directed Scream 7, but Josh Ruben seems to be a lot less accomplished. Still, he also directed Werewolves Within, a film that I have not seen yet but have been wanting to for a little while and will eventually get to. Philip Murphy and Michael Kennedy also possess writing credits on this film, and the latter is a frequent collaborator of Landon’s.

 

Olivia Holt plays the main character of this movie, but the end credits use the same billing trick as the television show Bones, having Mason Gooding, the male love interest, to the right and above her name, with hers at the bottom left. (That way, if you read left to right or up to down, they're both first billing and whatever.) But yeah this is a romantic comedy slasher horror movie relying on meshing the disparate elements and also shared tropes into a cohesive product, a challenge to be sure but not an insurmountable one. It wears this inspiration on its chest when it has the romantic comedy beats positioned in between slasher bits where there is the opening kill and then a meet cute or intimate confession of backstory between the leads and then back to slashing and then seemingly defeating the slasher right into chasing down the lover at the airport. A character even refers to the main relationship in this story as "crazy stupid love, actually” within a monologue listing off the names of other romcoms, so the meta references popularized by Scream remain intact.

 

 

Heart Eyes or The Heart Eyes Killer (HEK) wears some kind of leather mask that reminds me of Jason Voorhees' mask even though that was a hockey mask (I think the resemblance for me comes from the brow crease on HEK’s mask or, looking at it now, maybe just the nose bump). Notably, the mask has red night vision Heart Eyes, hence the name. Heart Eyes hunts lovers on Valentine's Day in a different city every time, employing the use of hunting knives, throwing knives and a crossbow to knock out their intended prey and whoever gets in their way. Consequently, the movie has a high kill count, but the heroes also survive really long against a person who can shoot a crossbow very precisely. (It is not impossible to make it work, but I appreciate the comparative restraint of Scream where Ghostface usually only gets a gun in the third act to raise the stakes or in Scream VI where he gets it for one tense scene and then the third act.) 

There are some genuinely interesting shots (shifting perspective and focus mid action scene or using Heart Eye’s vision gimmick in certain scenes), and the director does a good job at eliciting actor performances to serve the tonal balance of absolute contrived romantic sap and tense slasher storytelling. Notably, compared to his Scream character, Mason Gooding is a lot more vulnerable to taking damage in realistic ways here.

 

I was kind of able to figure out the twist in this movie, and part of this blog post will go over my thought process and the clues or red herrings I noticed on a first pass. However, this was difficult because, as I realized watching this, I understand now at least some of the tropes and shortcuts Scream will use in its mysteries but not for other derivative franchises. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film caught me off guard for not committing to the same type of killer reveal as Scream, and based on the spoilers I have for the film Thanksgiving, it is also possible for these films to just have a solution that does not add up logically (unless the sequels start retconning accomplices like the Saw films). So I did not know going in to err on the side of Scream or IKWYDLS or even Thanksgiving. I will say though, as a hint for any Scream movies if you want to guess them, across all 6 mainline installments, the most surefire method for that is ignoring whatever red herrings the film throws at you and just doing a head count of who is accounted for during every scene.

 

I found it very interesting how, during the opening scene, Heart Eyes killed the couple in a way that inverted the genital symbolism. In art but especially slasher art, penetrative killings are leveraged as phallic imagery, and, as the majority of slasher villains are men but slasher heroes are women, it becomes a way to explore brutal and visceral power dynamics often through knives or machetes or blade hands, all of which penetrate to kill. Heart Eyes uses their blades and arrows to kill the three men in the opening scene. But when the final girl of the opening escapes them by crawling into a wet cylinder, the walls close in on her, crushing her to death. (Incidentally, that cylinder was an industrial wine press.) That is already pretty blatant yonic imagery, but then the red water starts gushing out of vents or holes in the bottom of the machinery, putting a menstrual spin on the death. I have not seen as many slasher films as I would like to, but this seems atypical to me. 

Anyway, when the main detectives stumble upon this crime scene, the dialogue of this murder mystery also frames each of them as suspects but in the reverse way I would expect. The man says “it was probably my incel archetype that did this,” and the woman says “but what if it was a woman like me,” which is really weird because most films would just have them accuse the other person to get this point across efficiently.

 

It is ironic that the film underperformed because one of the romcom elements framing this whole thing is that both of the leads work in marketing for a jewelry company, and Olivia Holt’s character Ally made an advertisement mixing romance with death that bombed and pretty much cost her  job. Life imitating art imitating life, and all that. Through that introduction, the film does weave a compelling story for the heroine with a through line about her fears of intimacy and blood contrasted against her love interest, Mason Gooding’s Jay, who, true to the romcom genre is a bizarre mix of red and green flags because he is clearly analyzing her in every scene and very active in pursuing her (also incidentally a freelancer that was on site for each of Heart Eye’s previous sprees) but also very chivalrous and charismatic.

 

Alright so yeah, in a way that kind of tests your patience in a similar way to IKWYDLS, one of the main cogent suspects for the killer is the love interest (this is Jay, like Ray in IKWYDLS). Jay is not ultimately the killer, and I do not feel bad spoiling that because neither the trailer nor the film felt like pretending he could be. Of the rest of the cast, Ally has a friend named Monica who has a mysterious boyfriend Ally has not met, and Ally’s boss is a Kentucky Fried Tulsi Gabbard looking character with a horde of other employees, and there are five notable characters within a police department as well as Ally’s ex boyfriend and his new girlfriend who have ties to the opening kill victims. 

 

 

Going in, there were a few characters I exonerated for having their motives or introductions revealed too late to be cathartic, and actually I was kind of sort of wrong about one of those (but the strategy overall helped me sift through the red herrings and side characters). The motive is part of the reveal though, so more than that, it was about means and opportunity, and hilariously, though this movie has multiple killers, one of my suspects based on availability still ended up being one of them. (The utility behind having multiple killers is clearing guilty suspects and then prompting fan discussion on which one was in the mask during ambiguous scenes; it is really funny to me that not only could the character that ended up being Heart Eyes have done it alone, but dialogue also tells us exactly who did each scene.)

 

Though the ultimate killer reveal helped some staging inconsistencies (it strains credibility that Heart Eyes could have teleported into Ally’s closet unless there were at least two and one of them had the resources to find out her address quickly), it also creates a contrivance in how a wedding band that has the killer’s initials is important to the investigation into the only other character with those initials (Jay). The killers even reveal that they did not intentionally target Jay from the outset though as turns out to be lucky for them, he was in the same city as each of their previous sprees. Also, pending a rewatch to see if there was better foreshadowing, the film just kind of lies to us about the killers’ motivations until the end, making the motive almost unpredictable. (Obviously, you cannot give away the motive that early one, but the mystery genre is basically just literary Deconstruction in action, and for that to work, there has to be a misspeak in the text that points you to reversing your assumptions about the innocent/guilty binaries in the story, however subtle it is.)

 

I would recommend the movie all in all. Though it is not cleverer or more inspiring than the original Scream, this is a good movie, and it is good in both of the desired genres (which already makes it a better slasher than Scream 3). My main issues with it come from the logistical issues of some plot beats, but those exist in the base genres as well, so making the movie adhere to logic actually risks disrupting those tones. 

 

If I ever actually re-view this movie through an analytical lens, the yonic vs phallic nature of those opening scene deaths would be a good start (in which case I’d probably have to use Freud…who would actually enjoy the part of the movie where one pathetic character calls their lover mommy). I will say though that the film bookends the opening scene in the mid credits scene. In both circumstances, one far off character films two others in a wedding proposal (though I would not call this exactly sequel baiting). Despite some very inventive kills, the gore is rather tame COMPARED to other slasher movies. There is a fair bit of blood shown from minor injuries for realism but also to tie into Ally’s arc. It is rated R and so has the obligatory amount of F bombs. I have no idea if this film will get a sequel, but watch it if you like slashers or romcoms or if you hate both and have a morbidly romantic curiosity.