How To Lose A Life In 10 Hours
My thoughts on Heart Eyes
Blending together horror and comedy is not an unheard-of thing, of course, but it is the kind of genre mashup that is very tricky to pull off successfully. When the blend of chills and chuckles is just right—such as in Dawn of the Dead, An American Werewolf in London, The Howling and the original Scream—the resulting ability to inspire laughs and scares in equal measure can make for an exhilarating film experience. In too many attempts, however, the combination is not quite right and you are left with a movie that is either too silly to be scary or too gross to be amusing. In the case of Heart Eyes, which brings together the familiar tropes of slasher cinema and cheesy rom-coms to tell a story that suggests what Anyone But You might have been like with a higher body count, the filmmakers never quite manage to bring the two approaches together in a satisfying way and wind up wasting both the obvious chemistry between the two leads and a couple of satisfyingly grisly kills on a storyline that feels like it could have used a couple of additional drafts in order to live up to its ambitions.
The title refers to a notorious serial killer who has been on the loose for the last couple of years, appearing in different cities on Valentine’s Day to brutally massacre couples while sporting an all-black suit and a mask with heart-shaped lights where the eyes should be. As the film opens, we are in Seattle watching a couple of influencers at a remote vineyard trying to get their heavily stage-managed marriage proposal on camera for their audience. Alas, Heart Eyes is there and makes short and brutal work of the cameraman and one half of the couple before chasing the other into a building where they make the mistake of hiding in perhaps the single worst location you could choose in a vineyard to hide from someone determined to murder you. Put it this way—if you happen to see this movie on a date before having dinner, don’t be surprised if you find yourself ordering the white.
Meanwhile, Ally (Olivia Holt), the creative director at an ad agency, is facing a crisis even greater than the possibility of being slaughtered by a mad slasher. Still reeling from a bad breakup, her latest ad campaign—one that takes its inspiration from some of the classic scenes in screen history involving lovers coming to bad ends—has just blown up in her face with accusations that she is exploiting the Heart Eyes killings in the most tasteless manner imaginable. As a result, her company has brought in a hot young consultant to work with her for the day in the hopes of salvaging things. This is Jay (Mason Gooding), a handsome and relentlessly cheerful romantic who, as we have seen, has already encountered more than one Meet Cute-like situation with Ally before stepping foot in the office.
Despite both the holiday and the arrival of Heart Eyes, Jay proposes that he and Ally go out to dinner in order to come up with new ideas for the ad campaign—he has to leave town early the next morning. Their respective ideas towards romance—one idealized and the other cynical—cause them to clash and they are about to separate for the evening when the appearance of Ally’s old boyfriend and his new girlfriend cause her to kiss Jay and pretend that they are a couple. Unfortunately, this is witnessed by Heart Eyes and they decide to make Ally and Jay their latest targets, inspiring an all-night chase through the city as they try to avoid becoming the victims of the machete-wielding maniac.
Most films that attempt to combine comedy and horror usually try to get their laughs from their audience’s familiarity with the tropes and cliches that they have learned from other scare films and get their scares by upending that familiarity in order to shock them with new approaches to the bloody mayhem. The trouble here is that the screenplay, whose three writers have credits on such successful horror-comedy hybrids as the Happy Death Day films and Freaky, expends most of its energy on goofing on the conventions of romantic comedies in which two seemingly opposites end up falling in love after being thrown into strange circumstances. The problem is that none of the comedic insights on display are especially inspired—at one point, we get a wacky trying-on-clothes montage that is not demonstrably different from more straightforward examples and in another, a character delivers a monologue that invokes the titles of genre favorites that is funny at first but which soon becomes monotonous. Clearly the writers and director Josh Ruben known their rom-com history—even going so far as to include clips from His Girl Friday into a key sequence—and are clearly nudging it in the ribs but don’t really demonstrate any real idea of what they are trying to say about them.
While the inability to find an inspired comedic approach to this material is the film’s biggest flaw, Heart Eyes has other problems as well. Although the film does come up with a couple of reasonably effective set pieces—including the aforementioned vineyard opening and an inspired mass slaughter at a drive-in—and does not skimp on the gore, most of the horror-based elements are just not particularly scary or inventive. Instead of making sport of such time-honored ideas as inexplicably deserted police stations or seemingly extraneous characters (including a pair of investigators played by Jordana Brewster and Devon Sawa), it indulges in them without finding anything clever to say or do with them. Even if you are not a devotee of slasher cinema, you can pretty much sense ahead of time where all the scares are coming from (even if you didn’t see the trailer) and anticipate all the story twists long before they are deployed. The finale is a particular disappointment—it somehow manages the trick of being both predictable and inexplicable at the same time while feeling as if it was either rewritten too much or not enough before it went before the cameras.
What makes Heart Eyes especially frustrating to watch at times is that even though it ultimately fails to come together in any meaningful way, it has enough individual moments that do work to leave you wishing that the stuff that doesn’t had been worked out more thoroughly. The two big kill scenes that I have cited are undeniably effective—the drive-in scene is so good that it could, and probably should, have concluded things instead of the tepid finale on display. The two leads are both quite good as well—Gooding gets to demonstrate the easygoing charm that he has not quite had the chance to show in the last couple of Scream movies and Holt is just as winning (and her sometimes disconcerting resemblance to rom-com icon Julia Stiles cannot be discounted)—and there are some funny moments here and there, mostly supplied by Gigi Zumbado, who steals a number of the early scenes as Ally’s wisecracking pal and then unfortunately disappears for long stretches of time. Heart Eyes could have been the cinematic equivalent of a spectacular first date but ends up being nothing more than another disappointment that ultimately fails to live up to its initial promise.