Rushing back from a week of seeing a whole bunch of great films at Sundance to watch a screening of Heart Eyes — a grim sentence already infinitely scarier than anything that happens in this sad excuse for a slasher — I must have missed something at Sea-Tac in my post-festival sleep-deprived haze...
Did you know that the bustling Washington airport that millions travel through every year now has what seems to be giant palm trees right by its entrance? No? Well in the upside down world of the Seattle-set but New Zealand-shot Heart Eyes, a painfully slight horror rom-com lacking in basic chemistry or chills, these trees tower in the distance in a way that will elicit a laugh not just from Washingtonians, but anyone who has even the vaguest concept of the region.
The trouble is that this moment elicits the film's biggest reaction, while the rest of the forced proceedings are guilty of faking not just its Seattle location, but anything resembling genuine charm. Despite it trying so hard to be something close to Wes Craven's classic Scream and its modern sequels, Heart Eyes is a meandering, half-hearted horror comedy neither clever enough to be a sharp genre spoof, nor creative enough to work as a send-up of the other, much better films it's drawing from.
Directed by Josh Ruben, who previously made the wonderful Werewolves Within, it's a film that gives him next to nothing to work with as the script by a trio of writers — Michael Kennedy (Freaky), Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day 2U) and Phillip Murphy (Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard) — is so broad it undercuts the brief flashes of more fun bloody brutality. By the time all the pieces of its romance and horror tepidly come together, there is no pulse to be found.
After a promising opening sequence with where a masked killer known as Heart Eyes brutally butchers a couple and their photographer after they went through a staged proposal with a vineyard as the backdrop, the film picks back up with the struggling young marketing executive Ally. Played by Olivia Holt (Totally Killer), she is having a hard time with a breakup that seems to have spilled into work via an advertising campaign that centers on couples dying. This is one of the few humorous bits that work in the film, but it also means Ally is in trouble as people online view it as rather insensitive considering there is a killer on the loose who is stalking couples in Seattle with Valentine's Day fast approaching.
It's when she's about to go into work to face the music from her boss that she literally bumps into the handsome Jay, played by Mason Gooding (of the solid recent Scream reboot and its sequel Scream VI), at a coffee shop.
Of course, he turns up at her work as he has been brought in to clean up the situation. This awkward and oddly chemistry-free meet-cute then takes a murderous turn, becoming about the duo having to stop Heart Eyes over one romantic evening after the killer gets them in their sights.
Watching as the film drags from one empty encounter to the next, taking place everywhere from Ally's apartment to the Seattle police station (both of which never feel like actual places as much as they do sets) my mind drifted to the recent Malignant and what made that work. Yes, it was a film that also wasn't actually shot in Seattle, but it was so playfully bonkers that you didn't care. It may too have been faking the setting, but the energy that went into everything else grabbed you and didn't let go. Heart Eyes, on the other hand, just goes through the motions of classic slasher films and modern romantic comedies. It does so not to skewer them, but just to lightly mimic them, betraying how few ideas it has of its own with each obvious reveal falling flat.
There are some gruesome kills here and there that provide a jolt of energy to the otherwise lifeless film. The most fun part of the affair is when the duo goes to a drive-in theater that is playing the hilarious love story His Girl Friday, and you realize you'd just rather be watching that instead. Love, much like Seattle, is something you can't ever fully fake, but Heart Eyes just never feels like it is trying. The only thing it cuts to pieces is your investment in it.
Heart Eyes
Rated R
Directed by Josh Ruben
Starring Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding
