Monday, September 7, 2026

He Loves Me...Not

Film: Heart Eyes
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

If you are perpetually online, you have almost certainly seen clips of shows from the Dropout Network. One of the shows, Make Some Noise, is an improv show that frequently features the talents of Josh Ruben, known for some impressive impressions and the ability to make odd animal noises. I bring this up because Josh Ruben also directed the horror/comedy Heart Eyes. I know nothing about Ruben beyond what I’ve seen online. The comedy seems right on for what I know; the horror seems surprising.

Heart Eyes is an attempt to create a new slasher villain, a character with an iconic look. Our killer, naturally known as the Heart Eyes Killer or HEK, has had a two-year reign of terror. The gimmick is that HEK kills happy couples on Valentine’s Day. The first year, he killed couples in Boston; the following year, he attacked Philadelphia. Since this movie takes place in Seattle, you can guess the city that will be struck this year.

Now that we have our killer (and our opening scene where we can get the killer’s bona fides), we need to be introduced to our potential victim. This is Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt), a former medical student who now works in marketing for a jewelry company in Seattle. She has just been broken up with by her boyfriend Collin (Ben Black) and is naturally down on the idea of romance. This has lead to her disastrous current ad campaign, which shows famous romantic couples dying while their jewelry endures. Since HEK has just shown up in town, the campaign is not received well.

To rescue the company and possibly Ally’s job, her boss (Michaela Watkins) brings in advertising wunderkind Jay Simmonds (Mason Gooding) to redo the ad campaign. He and Ally are supposed to work together, but Jay has other things to do in the moment and gets her to agree to dinner that night to talk about the pitch. With the help of her friend Monica (Gigi Zumbado), Ally gets ready for the meeting, which looks like a date, and is on Valentine’s Day. What this means is that Ally and Jay are going to be mistaken for a couple by the Heart Eyes killer and hunted. It’s sort of a case of mistaken identity with crossbows.

What’s surprising to me is just how much time this film takes to really get going. There’s the opening sequence that gives us a bit of the persona of HEK, but beyond that, the opening of the film includes a coffee meet-cute between Ally and Jay, Ally getting yelled at, Jay being a bit dismissive and smarmy, and the two ending up in a fancy restaurant for their meeting. We don’t actually get a return of HEK and our characters in any real danger until we’re about 40 minutes into the film. That seems long.

Really, that’s the biggest problem with the film. There are a lot of threads that show up here that are desperate to be tied off eventually (and most of them are), but Heart Eye requires a tremendous amount of runway to get us there. We need to establish Ally’s current failure at work, her friend relationship with Monica, her boss’s opinion of her, Jay’s character, and more. So when we do finally get back to the hacking and slashing, it comes as a surprise, but this doesn’t happen until we’re a good 40 minutes into the movie.

I would love to tell you that Heart Eyes shows a measured hand in the director’s chair, but it absolutely does not. While there are some very splattering kills in this movie, Ruben is at heart a comedian, and the film is very much a dark comedy, but it is a slasher first. It also clearly wants to be a romance as well, and it kind of is, although for most of the film, I don’t really buy a lot of the chemistry between our two leads. The exception is a scene in a drive-in movie where they connect while two stoners have sex in the back of their vehicle. It’s a bit cringy, but also kind of works.

The reality of Heart Eyes is that it’s not going to make any new fans of the horror or slasher genre. It’s not going to make anyone suddenly a fan of horror/comedy. It’s entirely watchable, but HEK is not going to take the place of Freddy or Jason anytime soon. In fact, HEK isn’t going to take the place of The Miner from My Bloody Valentine. That said, the mask/costume is pretty good.

Why to watch Heart Eyes: Some solid kills and a few good laughs.
Why not to watch: It's very slow to get going.

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