Reviewed by Alicia Glass
The Heart Eyes Killer, a mass murderer who hunts down couples on Valentines Day, mistakes a pair of mismatched ad executives on a work dinner as potential victims, and mayhem ensues!
Yes, the film centers around Valentine’s Day and a serial killer who kills couples, but it’s supposed to be about romance and chemistry too, damnit! Gaggingly-sweet things for V-Day are all over the city and couples are defiantly still going out together, so make sure you’re still single and lets get into this!
So Ally (Olivia Holt) just can’t seem to catch a break recently. Matter of fact, all she got recently was a break up with her boyfriend, and thus being surrounded by all this Valentine’s Day nonsense is kind of annoying. It doesn’t help that Ally seems to have a bit of an odd sense of style, and her proposed advertising campaign centers around turning H.E.K. into a kind of heartsick if-I-can’t-have-you-no-one-can series of commercials, which of course goes over with her boss Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins) like a ton of bricks. The hottie she had an awkward first meeting with at the coffee shop, Jay Simmonds (Mason Gooding), turns out to be a fellow advertiser at Ally’s very same publishing house, who’s about to be handed the campaign Ally was originally handling for Valentine’s Day, for some serious fixing. And Ally’s well-meaning best friend Monica (Gigi Zumbado), still trying to convince Ally that romance isn’t dead and there’s some merit to Valentine’s Day hidden here somewhere, takes great glee in helping Ally dress for what she insists is a work-dinner-meeting-non-date with Jay later that evening.
Ally tries to dress up a bit nicer for her evening meeting with Jay, but better clothes won’t hide her bitter and almost curmudgeonly attitude when it comes to romance in general, and the irony of all that in an lady ad executive isn’t lost on her either, much to Jay’s bemusement. Jay is practically effortlessly charming, it does help that actor Mason Gooding is the son of Cuba Gooding Jr. who is also known for his many charismatic characters, and continually gamely tries to be at least cordial to an increasingly resentful Ally. Things take a turn for the dumber when Ally declares an end to their non-date and of course they run into Ally’s ex and his new woman as she and Jay are saying their goodbyes outside the restaurant, forcing Ally in her cynical irony to offer up Jay as her new, better, boyfriend. Who’s she trying to impress, anyway? Because it turns out, more than just Ally’s ex and his new squeeze, is watching.
From there, the film slides into by now standard film tropes of things like the killer hiding in your closet for the initial jump scare, oh so many slapstick running away from the killer only to cause destruction and mayhem to peripheral others along the way instances, and of course we can’t forget the initial assumption that Ally and Jay are a couple, despite their continued insistences they’re only colleagues, that eventually leads to a burgeoning romance in the midst of slasher horror anyfreakingways.
If you’re any kind of fan of movies like Happy Death Day, or Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, even the latter-numbered Scream movies, you will likely enjoy the inside-out celebration of love in Heart Eyes, available on Netflix now!