Like ‘Cat Person’ in 2023, ‘Heart Eyes’ is a dizzyingly good concoction of horror and romance – and it manages to juxtapose them with a great deal of humour and wit, unnerving us in the process. The premise entails a killer who strikes every Valentine’s Day and only targets couples, which lends this film at least an intriguing premise as the couple at its heart, Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), who meet in an advertising firm and due to a fanciful MacGuffin end up kissing, attract the attention of the killer who then doggedly pursues them.

But the fact that they are not actually a couple means that their particular friendship doesn’t fit the killer’s designs, and so the film addresses the scuppering of the killer’s modus operandi, and we are never entirely sure how this will pan out, and how many deaths there will be, or whether indeed the killer’s identity is one that can even be predicted.

Technically, what follows here is in keeping with the formula familiar from the ‘Scream’ films with their intertextuality and sense of mischief, but with doses of charm which mean we have an investment in the couple/not-couple and we are no less happy when the horror goes into overdrive or when the romance, with its meet-cutes and romcom tropes, is extended.

Audiences of slasher and romance are not usually the same, but this is proof that there is an interchangeability between the genres, giving this reasonably short film an originality and inventiveness which stands out in an age when horror movies are ubiquitous and not always memorable. The horror is properly visceral and extreme, justifying its 18 rating, and in so doing makes this a film of extremes, with the slasher and the romcom parts overly heightened.