Horror Film ‘Heart Eyes’ Is a Cinematic Smiling-Poop Emoji

Heart Eyes is like a box of assorted Valentine’s Day chocolates, offering up a variety of different flavors—Horror! Romance! Comedy!—in an attempt to satisfy all tastes. Unfortunately, few will be pleased by this bland stab at genre hybridization, whose sole accomplishment is falling flat at everything it tries.

Whereas his prior Werewolves Within was a jokey monster mash, director Josh Ruben’s latest is part rom-com, part slasher saga. Marrying love and death isn’t an inherently inapt idea, yet this dreary film, which hits theaters Feb. 7, doesn’t work hard enough to draw clever links between the two. Instead, it simply flip-flops on a dime, delivering nastiness one second and lovey-dovey squishiness the next. As with its personality-free killer, whose mask has two glowing heart eyes—thereby making him a murderous emoji—it’s a drearily generic affair.

On a Seattle winery’s hillside overlooking a misty valley, a man standing at a flowery wedding altar proposes to his girlfriend via a pre-written script that her lip-syncing indicates was written by her. They’re a parodic storybook picture, and they’re not long for this world, since they’re swiftly attacked by the Heart Eyes Killer, whose rampages in different cities during the prior two years has made him a notorious national boogeyman, to the point that everyone refers to him as H.E.K.

The fiend wields a machete, a crossbow, and a collection of throwing knives whose handles boast a heart-shaped cut-out, implying—along with his mask and black coat and boots—that he imagines himself a homicidal Batman. He wastes little time slaughtering his first three victims and then offs a woman in a machine designed to crush grapes, her blood pouring out of the spout as if it were vino.

Heart Eyes knows that this is a standard-issue slasher-movie intro, and it follows it up with a typical romantic-comedy meet-cute. At a coffee shop, Ally (Olivia Holt), still obsessing over her ex-boyfriend, figuratively and literally bumps into Jay (Mason Gooding), a hunk who immediately demonstrates that he’s her perfect match.

After an embarrassing turn of events, Ally bolts this encounter to head to her job as an advertising exec. In a crowded boardroom, she gets a dressing-down from her jewelry magnate boss Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins) for designing a campaign that revolves around famous doomed romances (Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, Bonnie and Clyde)—an ill-timed idea given that H.E.K. is on the loose.

With social media vitriol at a fever pitch, Crystal announces that she’s brought in a freelance superstar to save the day, and while it stuns Ally, it will surprise no one that the ringer is Jay.

Ally’s fear that she’s about to be fired is unfounded; Jay only wants to work together to fix this mess. Because he likes her and it’s Valentine’s Day, he suggests meeting for dinner to collaborate after he gets a massage. Shortly thereafter, news reports indicate that H.E.K. has struck again at a spa. Heart Eyes teases that Jay is the killer so hard that it comes across as a desperate and transparent ruse, and the proceedings prove equally clumsy when it comes to generating sparks between its two protagonists.

Ally is hurt and jaded and thus takes her anger out on Jay, pushing him away even though he’s clearly Mr. Right. In response, Jay suffers her slings and arrows and keeps charmingly smiling. They’re an awkward fit, and Holt and Gooding’s lack of chemistry more or less dooms the film’s effort to make them endearing.

Despite not being a couple, Ally impulsively kisses Jay outside a restaurant to make her ex jealous, and this smooch attracts the attention of H.E.K., who starts stalking them in all sorts of hackneyed horror locales, including an abandoned building, an empty carnival, a sparsely populated police station, and a drive-in theater.

These appear to be wink-wink indications that the film is in on its own joke, but there’s nothing funny or imaginative about it following a tired playbook. Worse, H.E.K. is a lackluster fourth-generation Jason Vorhees, hacking and slashing his way through anyone in his vicinity, and his rampages are as leaden as they are lethal. Heart Eyes’ one idea is to juxtapose grisliness with aww-shucks sweetness, as when Ally and Jay begin falling for each other in the front seats of a van as its hippie owners have ribald sex in the back and are then slain with a tire iron. Because it’s merely smashing multiple clichés into each other, however, the effect is wearying.

Heart Eyes wants you to know that it knows its forefathers, whether it’s via Ally’s best friend encouraging her to race to the airport to stop Jay from leaving with a speech full of rom-com references, or a finale that dips deeply into the Scream well.

As Ally and Jay struggle to stay alive, they’re forced to contend with a pair of detectives whose names are Hobbs (Devon Sawa) and Shaw (Jordana Brewster), and the randomness of that shout-out is almost as extreme as the lameness of their banter. Shaw eventually flirts with Jay and Hobbs comes face to face with H.E.K. in a strobe-lit hallway, but neither character is amusing and their role in the conclusion feels decidedly arbitrary even by slasher-movie standards.

Ruben aims for the sweet spot between silly, saccharine, and scary and misses quite badly, with Heart Eyes growing more erratic with each ensuing scene. Impalings, beheadings, and similar goriness dominate a climax set on a stormy night in a candlelit church (groan), and the film wraps up with a happily-ever-after that’s just as forced and stale.

The action’s lack of consistency is, to some extent, the point; it deliberately wants to seesaw between registers in order to elicit both laughs and screams. In theory, that’s fine, but it requires a great deal more proficiency than is demonstrated here. Some of the blame for that goes to Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy’s uneven script. And a considerable amount falls on its mismatched leads.

Ultimately, though, it’s the result of stewardship that rehashes a collection of genre hits without finding a way to do anything inventive with them. No matter its killer’s visage, Heart Eyes is really a cinematic smiling-poop emoji.