Heart Eyes is a 2025 romantic comedy slasher directed by Josh Ruben, written by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, and starring Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding as two Seattle coworkers who are mistaken for a couple by a serial killer who hunts couples on Valentine's Day. It runs 97 minutes, took $33.1 million at the box office, and features Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa as the detectives on the case. It is an enormous amount of fun and I had a genuinely great time with it.

I should say up front that I have watched a considerable number of slashers, both the straight-faced ones and the deeply unserious ones, and this sits comfortably among my favourites. It is good from the opening minutes through to the end, which is rarer in this genre than it ought to be.

The comedy is the thing I want to praise most, and specifically the way it fails. The jokes here are not always great. Some of them are obvious, some are telegraphed, and several land about a second after you have already seen them coming. And that is exactly why the film works. There is a particular pleasure in a comedy that knows a gag is slightly too easy and commits to it with total sincerity anyway. It never nudges you, never winks, never apologises. It simply does the joke, pushes it slightly too far, and moves on with enormous confidence. Variety flagged the obviousness as a criticism. I think it is the point.

The best example, and the thing that genuinely delighted me, is that the two detectives investigating the case are named Hobbs and Shaw. It arrives out of nowhere, there is a flat exchange about it being like the film, and one of them has not seen it. Entirely daft, and I laughed properly.

But the detail I discovered afterwards elevated it considerably. The screenwriters have confirmed that the detectives were always called Hobbs and Shaw. That name was in the script from the beginning, long before casting. And then, at some point in the process, somebody looked at that gag and decided it needed more, and went out and cast Jordana Brewster, who has appeared in the Fast and Furious franchise since the very first film in 2001, as Detective Shaw. That is not writing a joke. That is financing a joke. It is a commitment to a bit that I find genuinely admirable, and Brewster and Devon Sawa are clearly having an excellent time with it.

Beyond that, I am not going to spoil much, because this is a film that rewards going in with no expectations beyond a brain-off good time. Holt and Gooding have real chemistry, which the whole thing rests on, and Ruben is skilled at juggling tones that should not sit together. The kills are decently staged, the gore is more generous than the romantic comedy packaging suggests, and the rom-com structure is affectionately observed rather than merely parodied.