I’ve never really loved slasher films. I don’t necessarily dislike them in any way, but out of all the horror subgenres it’s just never been my favorite. That’s not to say there are no exceptions to this — I really dig “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Black Christmas” — but, for the most part, I’ve rarely found them particularly effective.
Maybe this is why I wasn’t initially excited for “Heart Eyes,” a slasher film that distinguishes itself by taking place on Valentine’s Day. It’s hardly the first slasher film to ever base itself on that holiday — “My Bloody Valentine” did the same thing in 1981 — but it’s maybe the first to also be a romantic comedy. And it’s with this concept that I actually became a bit intrigued: it’s really a very cool idea. I love it when filmmakers traverse genre lines and experiment with something genuinely unique. But unfortunately, what we have here is disjointed and never quite knows exactly what it wants to be.
The plot of the film is fairly simple: a serial killer, known as Heart Eyes, moves from city to city every Valentine’s Day and murders couples. This year, he’s in Seattle and, for one reason or another, he’s specifically targeting Ally (Olivia Holt), an advertising pitch designer, and her new friend — coworker? maybe lover? — Jay (Mason Gooding). Like any slasher film, there’s nothing more to it than that, or at least nothing worth recounting.
The core of the film is this relationship between Ally and Jay, a real will-they-won’t-they? story that, conventional as it is, hits all the expected beats. It’s here where “Heart Eyes” first begins to stumble. It seems to want to be both a parody of the rom-com and a bona fide addition to its canon. The clichés never feel knowing, they just feel like clichés. It’s true that the rom-com has never been a genre known for any sort of intense experimentation, but for a film that attempts to genuinely do something different I would’ve appreciated a more novel approach.
At the same time, it seems to want to be a parody of the slasher film too but, again, never quite succeeds. A movie like “Scream” works because it understands the genre it’s satirizing and deconstructs it in a legitimately unique way. “Heart Eyes” pretends it understands the slasher film but only ends up reiterating all the stereotypes in a way that’s predictable and dull. It’s very easy to check off a list of tropes and perform them semi-ironically, but it means little when the project has little-to-nothing to actually say about it.
There’s a reason why slashers aren’t as prolific as they were in the 1970s and 80s, it’s a genre that had a very specific heyday and can’t — or, at least, can’t easily — be recreated in earnest today without some amount of effective deconstruction. For example, let’s take Ti West’s “X,” which, in my mind, does successfully analyze the slasher film. It plays with the (vital) psychosexual undertones of the genre and manages to be both compellingly creepy and actually worth critical discussion.
I’m guessing, for most people, “Heart Eyes” is a perfectly fun film. As of my writing this column, it’s sitting at a 79% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, along with an 80% critics’ score. I’m willing to acknowledge that it just might not be my jam. But to be honest, I just found the film difficult to sit through. There just wasn’t much that interested me: at best, it was middling; at worst, I thought it was boring. Maybe the humor just isn’t my style either — other than one or two jokes here and there, I was really just annoyed by it.
Josh Ruben, the film’s director, is a former writer at CollegeHumor, a sketch comedy production house. And this makes a lot of sense: “Heart Eyes” is the exact sort of middle-of-the-road, just-perfectly-fine-enough-to-be-entertaining parody the audience can laugh and nod in knowing agreement at. Unfortunately, for a formula that’s been done to death, that style just isn’t enough. There are certainly worse ways to spend 97 minutes. I just wish that time would’ve been more engaging.
