Disclaimer – As a single person, I have never wanted the bad guy to succeed as much as I did in this movie.
The year is 1996, a horror film enters the zeitgeist. The film is one of the first mainstream meta films. It is a horror film, commenting about horror films, using horror film tropes, and, this is the most important part, it is doing it in a very clever and loving way. Loving in the sense that the creators enjoy horror films, so they are doing things with reverence. That film was Scream.
This film is not scream.
Heart Eyes (dir. Josh Ruben) does a cold opening like Scream where we learn about the HEK or the Heart Eyes Killer. For the last two years, during Valentine’s Day, a masked man with glowing hearts for eyes has been killing happy couples.
This year Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt), an ad executive who has just launched a disastrous campaign, still harbours feelings for her ex-boyfriend. She constantly checks his social media and is frustrated that he is seeing someone new. While getting coffee, Ally has a meet-cute with Jay Simmons (Mason Gooding) where they both make fools of themselves.
Ally gets back to the office where she is chastised by her boss in front of the whole team for her terrible campaign. (note this film was shot partly in Auckland so you can see different parts of the city and some Kiwi actors in some minor roles, which is a bit of fun.) Then who is to walk in to help save the campaign, but Jay, who is a marketing expert, hired to come in and save the day.
The news blares a story of a couple being brutally murdered and it appears that HEK is now in this city. No one takes the warnings seriously and everyone keeps going on with their lives.
Jay is only there for 24 hours, so he suggests that Ally and he go for dinner to talk about how they can resurrect this dying campaign but the dinner conversation is terrible and Ally wants to leave so on the way out they run into Ally’s ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend so Ally panics and starts to kiss Jay to try to make her ex jealous.
But who is watching these two lovers kiss, you got it, HEK. Now Ally and Jay are hunted and every one of their interactions is seen as a cute couple’s interaction rather than strangers trying to solve an ad problem.
The horror and suspense have some good moments and some genuinely disgusting deaths that had the audience audibly responding to the screen. Despite the leads both being very attractive and the desire of the script to be a will they won’t they type situation, it didn’t feel like they had any chemistry to care if they did or not. The HEK followed all of the horror tropes of being an unstoppable killing machine, yet the reveal didn’t have any of the sophistication or understanding of horror that Scream did. Yes, holding this film up to Scream is unfair yet it is trying to do many of the same things, just not as successfully. It was a bit of fun, but the script could have used some more challenging conversations to try to put in some more heart.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe
February 2025