A Subversive Valentines Day : Analysis of Companion and Heart Eyes
Celebrate the season of love with some of the goriest films this year
We have now entered the year 2025 and if there’s anyway to describe this time it would be disenfranchisement. People are just simply disillusioned by what is going on in the world, rather it be the start of a fascism in our Country, devastating plane crashes and wildfires destroying California - as a nation we haven’t started this year off well. With an attitude of cynicism among the general public, this Valentine’s Day this year feels off to me. I’ve never been a huge fan of the holiday in all actuality, but it does seem like this year people aren’t giving it the fanfare that it usually gets because people are just tired and feel burdened. Which is why the two Valentine’s Day adjacent movies currently playing in theatres feel timely for this era. Both films are horror movies wrapped around romance.
Companion, a movie directed by Drew Hancock that recently came to theatres starts with a meet cute moment at a grocery store. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) meets Josh (Jack Quaid) after he knocks over a bunch of oranges at a grocery store. The opening sets up a romance that would feel like it was out of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Swelling romantic music, the two leads lock eyes with one another and fall for each other. Iris explains that there were two defining moments in her life - the day she met Josh and the day she killed him. This movie takes a drastic turn. As the film continues we see Josh and Iris stay with a few friends at a Summer House. Things turn to worse as one man tries to take advantage of Iris and she murders him at the lake house. (Spoilers if you haven’t seen any trailer for the film) It is then discovered that Iris is actually a sex robot that Jack ordered online, all of her autonomy and emotion is programming and he set her up to murder this man at the lake house to take all of his money and run - framing the entire incident as a malfunction in the robots programming.
The fascinating thing about Companion that makes it so compelling is the way the film changes it’s framing multiple times until you realize where the true horror is coming from. In the opening shot, we believe Iris is the evil one that is planning to murder Jack. However, when the reveal is made that she is a robot- we as the audience start to sympathize with her more. One of the worst things you could do to someone is give them autonomy, have them fall in love and take it all away. We realize that Jack is a manipulative and controlling monster. The real villain, the true horror in the film is the human of the story. It ends up being a story with the audience rooting for the robot to escape and kill this man and find her own life outside of what this man is manipulating her to think and believe. The allegories here to the way men can manipulate women and believe they are their own property is easily defined. This distinctively makes Companion an anti romance movie. While the promotional material for the film state “from the producers of The Notebook and Barbarian” it doesn’t lean into the romance of the story and pushes more for the female liberation aspect of the film which in my opinion is the right call. The film is never as romantic as The Notebook but never as scary as Barbarian either. It’s a weird mesh of genre and tone that feels ultimately more like a science fiction film that has some gory elements attached. To me, it feels like a more commercially buyable Ex Machina but it is a movie I enjoyed watching. I think the screenplay is sharp and Sophie Thatcher gives a star making performance as Iris. As a Valentines Day movie, it utterly fails. It’s pretty cynical to the ideas of a meet cute and a blossoming romance.
Heart Eyes, on the other hand works as a Valentines Day movie and a horror movie. The movies cold open starts in a very Scream-esque fashion as we follow a couple getting engaged. This is when the man gets shot in the head with an arrow and his fiancé starts running. The masked killer starts to chase her into a cellar and traps her in a wine press machine where we see her head explode on screen. This moment took me aback when I saw it in theatres. Outside of the Terrifier franchise, it seems of late horror movies like to stay away from showing graphic violence on screen to be more buyable to a general public audience. Heart Eyes isn’t concerned with this and has some gnarly kills on screen, which I appreciated.
The film sets up as a very cynical device. Almost as if the director and writer have written a slasher villain to target couples on Valentine’s Day as a way to vent about their own frustrations about the holiday. It ends up being about a little more than that. The film is about a girl named Ally (Olivia Holt) who is going through a recent break up. This leads to her to create a marketing campaign at her job that cynically shows that all love ends in death. Since her job is in the market to sell jewelry on Valentines Day while there’s a slasher villain on the loose, the campaign feels tone deaf and she’s under media firestorm. Jay (Mason Gooding) is hired on for the company to fix her campaign and Ally feels like her job security in is jeopardy. Jay is a lot more of a hopeless romantic and is immediate in his attraction to Ally and Ally is pushing away any feeling she could have for him in fear of being hurt again. The two go out on Valentines Day to discuss the future of their marketing campaign and are mistaken by Heart Eyes as a couple. The two ‘will they won’t they’ leads have to survive the night from the slasher.
Heart Eyes is a really fun movie. It is every single romantic comedy and slasher movie you’ve ever seen before. If you’ve seen a three act structure in a movie like this, you will be able to predict every beat this movie has thrown at you. However, the mesh of both genre’s help give the film a new identity. This movie has a few laugh out loud moments, some genuinely shocking and gruesome kills and the romance at the center of the film is well defined. The main two leads have dynamite chemistry with one another. There’s some conversations they have about the fear of intimacy, relationships and abandonment that I found pretty poignant. Not to mention, I think the movie looks really nice as well. I love the locations and set pieces in this movie. There’s a sequence in this film that entirely takes place at a drive in movie that I thought was pretty riveting and filled with a lot of tension.
Director Josh Ruben, a College Humor actor turned director has a lot of potential as a filmmaker. Heart Eyes could have easily been an uninspired run of the mill winter movie just designed to make a studio a profit. Instead, he took a premise and just had a lot of fun with it. This movie isn’t deep, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any way and overall it’s fairly conventional - but it totally works as a Valentine’s Day romantic comedy and a horror film all the same. While I believe Companion is overall a smarter and more subversive film, it doesn’t work as a horror film or romantic comedy in the way Heart Eyes does. Heart Eyes feels like a movie like When Harry Met Sally that happens to have a serial killer running around and chasing them and if that was the elevator pitch for the film - I can see why it sold. That just sounds like a fun time at the movies.
Companion and Heart Eyes share similar DNA but have totally different approaches. Heart Eyes starts off as a cynical look at romance and ends up being a sentimental look at finding love even in the most unexpected of places. Companion starts off as a cute love story that turns into an examination about how people need to find their own autonomy in their life outside of just being someones robot. I think both operate well as clever counter programming in this season of movies and will become cult objects in years to come.