At its moment of most shine, CollegeHumor was perhaps the ubiquitous Internet content for a certain demo of Internet users. From the vantage of 2025, it’s likely difficult for most to recall the level of cultural cachet the company once held — does anyone even remember that Vimeo was actually a spinoff of CH? — particularly as its post-2018 rebranding, Dropout, has largely been subsumed into the anonymous ether of endless swipeable stuff (unless your consumption interests lie at the intersection of D&D and oddball comedy, in which case Dropout has you covered). And yet, somewhat unbelievably, CollegeHumor predated Facebook and YouTube by roughly half a decade, arriving less than two years after Google, and injecting its DNA into the early-Internet years, an imprint that remains easily traceable all the way to our present TikTok era. The talent that flocked to its stable, then, shouldn’t be surprising, and many of the major players of its circa-2010 heyday went on (and continue) to be voices and writers in the worlds of SNL, The Daily Show, and various late night talk shows, among other notable projects.
Also moving through the CollegeHumor pipeline during this period was Josh Ruben, one of the company’s more eccentric performers, who cut his directorial teeth on CollegeHumor shorts and originals during this period. But rather than go the more common post-CH route of comedy writing, Ruben moved into the world of film, and specifically the halls of horror. Arguably a surprising shift on the surface, anyone even cursorily familiar with Ruben’s particular comedic instincts will likely follow a kind of logic in this development, as his emphasis on the surreal and unsettling always bore out undercurrents of derangement (the exact line between humor and horror with regard to his Gale Beggy character remains illegible to this day). In fact, clarity with regard to the spectrum his films operate on is perhaps best understood by looking instead at two films Ruben has performed in: on one end, you have the outlandish, idiosyncratic take on modern horror with the likes of Travis Stevens’ A Wounded Fawn; on the other, there’s the demented comedy of suburbia in Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe’s Greener Grass. Which is to say, rather than leaving his comedy behind, Ruben’s directorial efforts have taken care to port over the fount of absurdism that informed his CollegeHumor work, folding it into a horror connoisseur’s sandbox of identifiable horror tropes and conventions.
Heart Eyes marks Ruben’s third outing behind the camera, and is no doubt his most visible project yet, securing an $18 million-dollar budget from Sony after speciality releases from Shudder and IFC on his first two projects, which were self-financed and made for $6.5 million, respectively. And with this latest effort, it looks more than ever like Ruben is situating himself as something like Christopher Landon’s younger sibling in style, substance, and tone, leaving the same questions to surround him that have followed that writer-director (who, in fact, is a co-writer here). Are the films too reliant on low-hanging fruit? Are impish hat-tips to genre yesteryear sufficiently substantive, and what remains when said genre reflexivity is exhausted? Is riffing on voices of horror’s past constitutive of a voice itself? Like Landon has proven wont to do, Ruben here hangs his latest film on an all-caps conceit: the rom-com slasher.
As all slashers must, Heart Eyes commences with a healthy dose of table-setting. Ally (Olivia Holt) is a jaded ad exec grinding for a jewelry company and still reeling after a recent break-up. So when her latest campaign proposal trades in the notion of doomed love, her boss Crysta (Michaela Watkins) is displeased, for a few reasons. For starters, it’s Valentine’s Day and Abby’s concept is seen as insensitive given that the Heart Eyes killer has moved across various major metros over the past few years, dispatching young-in-love couples on this most Hallmark of holidays — no love is more doomed than the one that ends in dismemberment. Crystal is also immediately coded as a villain, rocking a hairstyle that lands somewhere on the continuum between Cruella de Vil and Tulsi Gabbard. But all that this signaled antagonism amounts to is Abby’s forced pairing with Jay Simmons, a hopeless romantic and marketing ringer brought in to course correct the non-starter campaign. As happenstance would have it, this dream team is also fresh off a bumbling, coffee shop meet cute that took place only minutes before this all-hands meeting.
Things kick into gear after Abby and Jay meet up for a late-night dinner/strategy sesh, where the latter’s attempts to charm (bubbly all around!) and engage (do you have siblings?) results in an already on-edge Abby laying into the ostensible nice guy and causing him to throw in the towel. As they prepare to go their separate ways while waiting for a cab outside the restaurant, Abby’s ex-boyfriend arrives, which she of course responds to by kissing Jay, a deceit he gamely goes along with. Little do they know that Heart Eyes has chosen Seattle for its killing ground this year, has just witnessed their lip-locking, and has marked them for his Valentine’s slay. From here, the mistaken non-lovers are on the run, fusing the requisite hurdles of the rom-com and slasher template: there’s betrayal, with Jay accusing Ally of leaving him for dead at one point after they are separated (she definitely did); there are trust issues, as Ally questions if Jay could be the killer after cops catch him wearing the Heart Eyes mask — which, by the way, looks like My Bloody Valentine’s Miner got a little more into the spirit of the holiday, in the most literal way possible — in the park where she is nearly killed; there are even drive-in theatre and carnival set pieces found in these frames, which have got to be the quintessential switch-hitting iconography shared between rom-com and horror.
All of which is to say, Heart Eyes does not shy away from reference or established playbook, both to its benefit and detriment. At any given moment, the film might recall such disparate films as Scream 2 and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, before soon reminding of Thanksgiving and then moving in the direction of something like In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Ruben is fluent in both templates, and his best trick is retaining the earnestness of the rom-com amidst all the arterial spray; striking that balance is not an easy thing to orchestrate, but Heart Eyes’ genre ebb and flow feels both effortless and carefully calibrated. But by the time we make it to the film’s final third, the film’s one trick has already been stretched too thin. The few creative flourishes with regard to the violence aren’t enough to distinguish killings that are by and large bloody but pro forma, and the film’s slight but clearly intentioned gender inversion — Abby being by far the more capable survivor and combatant — is likewise one-note and, given the rest of the film’s horror reverence, surprisingly blind-eyed to the final girl trope in its very conception. The coda does double down on the film’s prevailing earnestness, confirming the savviness of Ruben’s vision of blood-dripping sincerity, but it’s not enough to shake the feeling that this remains more of an intellectual exercise than a visceral experience. Ultimately, Heart Eyes is a charming, playful night out on the town, but it doesn’t deliver a lasting connection.
DIRECTOR: Josh Ruben; CAST: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Jordana Brewster, Devon Sawa; DISTRIBUTOR: Screen Gems/Sony Pictures; IN THEATERS: February 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
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