Mason Gooding - Blog Posts

Heart Eyes Misses the Mark

Heart Eyes (2025) directed by Josh Ruben

2/7/25 

*No Spoilers*

Horror movies are hard to make, the hardest being slasher flicks, because everyone has seen at least one in their lifetime. It’s easy to fall into the same tempo that other slasher flicks have, but what breaks my heart is when a slasher takes a unique concept and squanders it. Heart Eyes, directed by Josh Ruben, is a great example of this. 

I usually know when I won’t like a movie, I get a tingling sensation in my gut and I know I’m in for a bad time. The concept of the movie sounded interesting to me, a serial killer who targets couples on Valentine’s Day stalks enemies-to-lovers coworkers who must work together to survive. That is an interesting premise, but the execution was bland and unoriginal. 

The movie centers around Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), coworkers tasked with nullifying a company PR crisis on Valentine’s Day. However, when they’re mistaken for a couple by the Heart Eyes Killer, their night spirals out of control, leading to death and mayhem. 

I was hopeful during the first few minutes of the film. What I was hoping for was a darkly macabre critique on dating culture, as the opening sequence of the film made me chortle from the goofy actions of the characters who were soon slaughtered. It was a humorous sequence, but also heavy-handed and blunt with it’s jokes. This brand of humor tainted the movie, making it borderline unwatchable. I would’ve been fine with constant tongue-in-cheek jokes if they were good. But they weren’t good, none of them were, and it ruined my viewing experience. While watching this film, there were several middle-grade children in the audience and I noticed they were the only ones laughing at the ‘funny’ parts of the movie. It tried so hard to be quirky and funny, almost like a black comedy, but it wasn’t a black comedy, it was a mediocre slasher film with terrible jokes written by older folks for a younger audience. 

There was a scene that I would’ve really loved, an emotional scene where Jay and Ally’s characters were finally opening up to each other, and it would’ve been the best scene in the movie, except the entirety of it is overshadowed by the violent sex noises of the couple behind them. It would’ve been fine if you could faintly hear the couple’s moaning, but the sound guys pulled out all the stops with wet clapping sounds, sometimes louder than the actor’s themselves. Imagine the scene from Titanic where Jack dies, now picture the same scene with aggressively loud porn playing in the background. It wouldn’t surprise me if Holt and Gooding did this scene not knowing what was going to be plugged in the background, then saw the end result at the screening and were mortified. The only good scene in the entire movie was ruined by this film’s stupid juvenile humor. I love a good joke, especially raunchy ones, but this film has no idea what it wants to be. Is it a black comedy, or is it a horror film? It can’t make up it’s mind. 

You can always tell when a white person is writing a black character, you can always tell when a man is writing a female character, and you can always tell when people over the age of fifty are writing characters under the age of thirty. There were so many brainrot sentences in this film that my brain was slowly growing numb from the viewing experience. Phrases such as incel, beta, troll, sugar daddy, love language, algorithm, and shooting my shot were all used, and they were all used in a clumsy way, as if the writers weren’t used to the crazy slang the kids of today use. One character even used the sentence “incel-beta-troll” to describe the killer. It was all so painful to watch. After watching the movie, I checked to see what else the writers worked on and it did not surprise me to learn the writers behind Heart Eyes were the same masterminds who constructed Freaky (2020) and Happy Death Day 2U (2019). 

The protagonists and the killer are both extremely dumb. There are points in this movie where both Jay and Ally have a clear shot to kill Heart Eyes and they don’t pull the trigger. Even when they do, they wound him in some arbitrary place that doesn’t stop him from hurting others. Likewise, the killer has several opportunities to kill the two and blows it everytime. The killer goes from being a spectacular marksman, one who can nail a target from fifty feet away, and seconds later he can hardly hit Ally at all. Those who watched the movie might argue that the plot twist (if you can even call it that) explained this discrepancy, but it doesn’t and I would be happy to argue about it in my DMs. 

Also, I predicted who the killer was in the first twenty minutes. I also predicted the plot twist and neither of them were shocking at all. Not to mention the killer’s motivations are so vague and stupid I was angry by the time the credits rolled. 

What saddens me is that Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding are good actors, they’re a big part of the reason why I saw the movie in the first place. Their acting was a highlight of the movie. They weren’t god tier, but they were good, and getting someone to care about a two-dimensional character is hard. Holt and Gooding took two flat characters and enhanced them and that’s something I can appreciate. My only hope is that this movie does well at the box office and the two of them can move on to more apt rolls that are better suited for their talents. 

Another aspect of the movie I enjoyed was the fight scenes. They felt quick and fluid, which I enjoyed. That’s pretty much all there is to say about this disappointment of a movie. If you’re planning a Valentine’s date night go watch Companion instead. This movie is not worth your time. 

Final Grade: D

Rick Stepp (irresponsibleink@gmail.com)