IMG via Sony Pictures Entertainment
Is “Heart Eyes” a Slasher film that delivers?
Ever since the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween, the subgenre of holiday-themed slashers has persisted through the ages. Released in 1978, Carpenter’s film was neither the first proto-slasher of its kind (Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho all paved the way decades before) nor the first holiday-set horror film (Bob Clark’s Black Christmas came out just a few years prior, and Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan revolves around the Sabbath and was released back in 1922). But Halloween broke open the floodgates like never before, leaving a lasting, monolithic impact on the horror genre as a whole, and setting a distinct precedent for holiday-themed slashers. In the years that followed, we got everything from Friday the 13th to April Fool’s Day to My Bloody Valentine.
For the overwhelming majority of these holiday slashers, the actual setting of it happening on the holiday in question matters decidedly little. The holiday of Halloween was something grafted onto Carpenter’s film late in the game, with the film being simply titled “The Babysitter Murders” in its earliest stages. The day of Friday the 13th matters so little to that series that several installments don’t even take place on the titular date. It is into this unique and storied ecosystem of niche subgenres that Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes enters.
Heart Eyes is a film full of twists and turns, but by far the most delightful surprise of all is the extent to which the film embraces its Valentine’s Day setting. Ruben’s film is not simply a slasher film that happens to be set on Valentine’s Day with a bit of light dressing; it embraces the fervor and traditions of the holiday to such a degree that it becomes a pillar of the film’s visual language and structure. Heart Eyes is a bona fide romantic horror comedy, and it fucking rules.
Ruben has demonstrated an adeptness at constructing horror comedies before, with his thoroughly enjoyable previous film Werewolves Within. Here, however, he gets an added assist from fellow filmmaker and genre multi-hyphenate Christopher Landon himself. If you don’t know Landon by name, you should. He’s the obscenely gifted filmmaker behind genuine modern horror-comedy classics like Happy Death Day, We Have a Ghost, and his as-of-this-moment magnum opus, the masterpiece that is Freaky. All of Landon’s work (often written in conjunction with his regular collaborator, Michael Kennedy) blends a multitude of genres together while still delivering deeply satisfying results on all fronts. One of Landon’s real talents is his ability to anchor the genre-hopping madness of his stories in deeply drawn, highly articulate characterizations. Landon and Kennedy both worked as writers on Heart Eyes, and all of their most positive creative hallmarks shine through in spades.
Heightening all of these great attributes is Ruben himself, who is clearly having a blast staging and shooting these huge horror setpieces. From the horror perspective, Heart Eyes has one foot in the classic slasher tropes of the past and another in the more post-modern awareness of ‘90s slashers like Wes Craven’s Scream. Ruben’s visual work blends these two worlds seamlessly as he and cinematographer Stephen Murphy craft a cinematic vernacular that feels varied, arresting, and huge in scope. On top of all of this, they handle the tonal tightrope walk of the film’s script with such adeptness from the very opening frames that it’s honestly kind of startling.
Heart Eyes plays to an audience like a carefully cultivated, well-oiled machine. The prologue of the film sets the stage for what is to come, both narratively and formally, and it immediately won this writer over. With a bevy of genuinely funny jokes that land, clever subversions of expectation, and a culminating horror setpiece that ruthlessly raises the stakes and ups the insanity factor straight out of the gate, all within a couple of minutes? It’s fantastic, and the rest of the film more than lives up to the high expectations set here. It is a tremendous testament to editor Brett W. Bachman’s work that it feels as though the film is so succinctly in lock-step with its audience’s expectations and apprehensions from the very beginning. It can be obscenely difficult to string out a feature-length narrative like this and not have the audience either get a mile ahead of the story or completely left behind by it, but thanks to some carefully crafted writing, excellent direction, and superb editing, Heart Eyes keeps its finger thoroughly on the pulse.
It’s also worth noting how large of a role Jay Wadley’s score plays in calibrating audience expectations and how well it serves the film as a whole. Much of Wadley’s musical work feels very Harry Manfredini or Marco Beltrami-indebted, playing indulgently in the sandbox of a big slasher franchise and mining the Bernard Herrmann-inspired soundscapes of those composers to maximum effect. But for as critical as the more overtly terror-inducing music is, Wadley’s more tender and romantic work is arguably even more important, and he nails it.
Which is really the secret weapon of the film. Heart Eyes is a romantic comedy through and through. The film makes a meal out of piercing through the membrane of the tropes of both the rom-com and horror genres and sewing the two together. While that may initially sound like chucking two disparate tastes into a blender and just seeing what happens, the creative team here is able to make the results feel incisive and insightful. A gargantuan part of the reason the film works at all, and especially why this genre-medley approach is able to function, is the central relationship at the very heart of the film: Olivia Holt as Ally and Mason Gooding as Jay.
The film is full of really fun, scenery-salivating supporting performances, but the lead performances by Holt and Gooding are honestly revelatory. As Landon and Kennedy have proven so adept at in the past, Heart Eyes manages to so articulately and skillfully spend its first act ferociously endearing the audience to its central characters in this insanely effective manner. This is only further bolstered by Holt and Gooding, who give multi-faceted, astoundingly charismatic performances in their own right and also have such insane on-screen chemistry together that you have no problem believing the Heart Eyes Killer changed his entire night’s plan based on feeling the second-hand heat from their first kiss. Major props are also due to Ruben once more, who steers so wholeheartedly into the skid here and embraces building the entire film around this central relationship and delivering something unabashedly sincere and earnest.
By the end of the film, audience members who want to see a horror film will leave undoubtedly satisfied, and audiences who want to see a romantic comedy will leave equally satisfied. It manages to hit all the requisite beats of each genre’s respective structure, make it feel organic, and thoughtfully ponder the relevance and significance of these tropes as it does so.
RGM GRADE
(B+)
Heart Eyes is such an outlandishly and infectiously enjoyable romp. Josh Ruben and Christopher Landon are each two of the most exciting voices in horror right now, both so skilled at blending genres with such finesse, and the opportunity to see them working together here to create something that feels so surprising and fresh? That’s what going to the movies is all about.
