Valentine’s slasher Heart Eyes bleeds sincere rom-com adoration across 2025’s first great horror comedy

Heart Eyes. // Courtesy Sony Pictures

Picking a date night movie is a tricky process at the best of times, but it’s even harder on  Valentine’s Day. You and your partner may have totally different tastes. Picking something to watch together that won’t bore or turn off the other person is a balancing act that almost guarantees one of you won’t be happy. 

Singletons don’t get off easy, either. You may be in the mood for something romantic, but not so romantic that it’ll make you feel bad about being alone—which Valentine’s Day is, for many, designed to do. Maybe you’re so off on the holiday that you just want to see some stuff get destroyed in a festive way. 

What’s a movie lover who loves love but also other stuff to do? 

Fortunately, as of February 7, there’s an answer for all of these situations: Heart Eyes, a Valentine’s-centric slasher that manages to be a charming rom-com and a delightfully squicky horror movie at the same time. It’ll satisfy your bloodlust and your lust-lust, and that’s no small feat.

Valentine’s Day is the most romantic day of the year, but for much of America, it’s become cause for alarm. For the last three years, a serial murderer known as the Heart Eyes Killer has targeted couples in different cities, transforming saccharine social media-friendly declarations of love into grisly displays of death and dismemberment.

In Seattle, marketing exec Ally (Olivia Holt) is facing a potential career death after her “doomed lovers”-themed ad campaign for a jewelry brand hits the internet at the same time as news of Heart Eyes’ latest killing spree. Ally’s high-maintenance boss (Michaela Watkins) brings in freelancer Jay (Mason Gooding) to clean up Ally’s mess. Sparks fly between Ally and Jay, but their burgeoning enemies-to-lovers vibe unfortunately puts them right in Heart Eyes’ crosshairs.

Heart Eyes. // Courtesy Sony Pictures

Heart Eyes comes with a pedigree that lets you know right off what we’re in for. Director Josh Ruben is a rising star in genre filmmaking, with two excellent horror-comedies (Scare Me and Werewolves Within) to his name. He’s working from a script co-written by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy, whose collective resume includes Freaky, Happy Death Day and It’s a Wonderful Knife. We’re working with a three-pronged pitchfork of genuine sentiment, nasty kills and committed physical comedy. It’s hard to name other filmmakers working at this level who do that specific combination this well.

As a director, Ruben—a skilled writer and performer on his own—excels at getting his cast to operate on his deranged wavelength. Holt and Gooding have genuine chemistry balanced with committed performances as two people falling in love while on the run from a serial killer (it helps that Gooding’s a veteran of Radio Silence’s Scream reboot, so he knows exactly what’s required). Genre stalwarts Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa seem to be having oodles of fun as a pair of cops trying to catch the holiday killer.

Heart Eyes. // Courtesy Sony Pictures

“Fun” is the operative word here. Ruben’s films always seem like the performers are having the time of their lives letting loose, and Ruben himself exudes childlike glee in the cartoonish onscreen violence he depicts. It’s in the tire iron protruding from a victim’s skull, the chaos during a murder spree at a drive-in theater or the sound design as a woman staggers through a warehouse, the metal arrowhead stuck through her foot clanking awkwardly on the concrete floor. This stuff is icky, obviously, but the joy in the details is what makes them funny and memorable.

Heart Eyes’ surprising balance of romance, humor and gore—often switching between all three in a single scene—is a highly original and surprisingly effective blend. It’s perhaps less surprising when you go in knowing that this is an ideal creative marriage between filmmaker and material. Nevertheless, no matter what you go in wanting, you’ll get it and more besides.

In dating terms, it’s the whole package.