Love is in the air, so it must be destroyed!
dir: Josh Ruben
2025
Who doesn’t love love?
What sick twisted individuals aren’t moved by the rush of reactions and hormones that occur in our bodies tricking us into thinking there’s more than biological imperatives going on when we hook up for lustful reasons or more prosaic ones like just wanting someone to eat chips with on the couch in front of the tv?
Churls, absolute ungrateful churls, the lot of them. And you would think that a serial killer who seems to target loving couples around St Valentine’s Day resulting in massacres of love struck fools, you would think it’s this killer that must hate love itself, abhor romance, disdain delirious passion.
But no, it’s not the killer wearing a goofy mask with glowing hearts for eyes who is the ungrateful churl who hates love; it’s our lead character Ally (Olivia Holt), who is anti-romantic in a world that constantly seems to be punishing people for being in love and posting about it on IG, or for not believing in love enough.
Mixed messages. Ally looks like the American lead of every American romantic comedy ever, especially the Lifetime / Hallmark ones pumped out by the Romance / Military – Industrial Complex. Someone must be watching them all, because they keep making them, and what they know is that the lead has to be a blonde woman who’s been burnt before but just when she’s given up hope of ever finding love again, finds someone who at first she hates but then realises is the single and only greatest person who’s ever lived, fixing every problem in their lives before the gift-wrapped ending.
So even though this is a comedic horror flick, it apes the rom com formula to great effect, just with lots of gruesome killings thrown into the mix, amidst all the treacly bullshit.
The enemies-to-friends-to-lovers path doesn’t work if there isn’t a handsome hunk for her to lose her shit over, and what do we have here other than an absolute nepo baby in the form of Jay (Mason Gooding, son of Cuba Gooding Jnr). He may not be that charming, and he may not have any discernible qualities, but… He’s here, at least.
The two characters have a meet cute at a café that seems promising in terms of potentially establishing a connection with someone new after a messy break-up, but it’s immediately derailed by Ally going against her feelings by reasserting her belief that love is a lie and solves nothing in life.
To add injury to insult, Ally works in advertising, and has squandered a fortune running an ad campaign focussing on the ends of Romeo & Juliet and Titanic asserting that, sure, love is whatever, but DEATH STALKS US ALL!
I mean, she’s not the first to link sex and death, or the more hoity toity way of saying it, Eros and Thanatos, as driving forces in art and in our psyches, but her boss at the company doesn’t appreciate it, philistine that she is. Luckily, and unbeknownst to Ally, Jay was brought in from elsewhere in order to save the campaign and either save Ally’s job or destroy it? I am not sure.
Either way, now that she “hates” him, they are forced by circumstance to work together again, and, as luck would have it, an opportunity for Jay to wear down Ally’s defences and rekindle within her the possibility of loving again.
And that’s when the killer starts stalking them.
“WE’RE NOT TOGETHER!” they keep screaming as the killer implacably advances on them. But the killer knows, the killer sees the attraction, the chemistry between them, sees that they’re meant for each other.
And that therefore they must die.
A film like this, so dependent on mocking and embracing the rom-com format at the same time, only works if the rom-com parts work. Anyone can construct slasher set pieces, but they rarely make a movie (unless they’re just so amazing that no-one cares about the interstitial bits of humans being human but waiting for the reaper).
This kind of slasher flick with the implacable and appearing out of nowhere killer who is invincible until the very end usually doesn’t appeal to me that much because I’ve seen so fucking many of them that little can shock or surprise me these days, especially after also watching documentaries about the real awfulness of murderers against people in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Congo, but I could say the same thing about rom-coms as well. I have seen them all, and yet there is still the thrill there, the possibility of finding something and someone wonderful, someone who sees you and gets you. That’s the promise even a parody of a rom-com can deliver, and they did well enough that it brought a smile to my face. Not a tear to my eye, but at least a smile. This flick requires Ally and Jay to go from strangers to acquaintances to people looking out only for themselves to people who work together in order to survive, and it does it in a playful enough and charming way. And that’s why the flick works so well.
I am a sucker, admittedly, a gullible sucker, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. I enjoyed it, even if the killer dynamic didn’t really do much for me, nor the revelation as to identity at the end. It doesn’t matter who wears the mask and tries to gut people out of hate – what matters is if the young attractive duo get their shit together and kill the fucker TOGETHER, AS A COUPLE.
Not everything works, but not everything has to. Jordana Brewster plays a cop in this, and they roll out an agonising Hobbs and Shaw reference because she has been in many of the Fast and the Furious movies, playing the crucial role of Dom’s sister and Brian’s love interest. The gag couldn’t be more painful or less awkwardly staged.
And though she’s fine / amusing as the appalling best friend, Monica (Gigi Zumbado) does have a word salad unending line of dialogue that does contain almost every rom-com title you can think of, and, huh, it’s either the best moment in the film or the cringiest, or both, but I do feel like I saw the light of life leaving her eyes as she was saying it and being swallowed alive by embarrassment.
Still, it’s a good, cheesy foray into mainstream horror romance comedy from someone who’s made a couple of other horror-ish comedies that I’ve really enjoyed as well (being Scare Me and Werewolves Within). And I feel glad for him, especially since he’s been hustling for so long to get where he is (now), but even then the poor bastard lost his house in the January fires that hit Altadena in California, just before this flick was released in February. How much must that have sucked having to do interviews and press spruiking the film and thinking “I’ve lost everything?”
A lot, I’m guessing. Still, the success of this flick will probably lead to hundreds of terrible sequels, so if there’s any justice in this world (last I checked there isn’t), he and his wife will be able to get back on their feet and rebuild, and eventually make more movies.
Love in the face of adversity – there could be something in that.
7 times Cupid’s arrows aren’t meant to lead to so many fatalities out of 10
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“Hey, Ally? Ally, listen to me: you deserve to be happy. You deserve to have someone love you for the beautiful, neurotic mess that you are. I mean, you can be so clueless sometimes; it's one of the ten things I hate about you, honestly. You can't let Jay go off to his best friend's wedding and hook up with a bunch of bridesmaids and move to Notting Hill. No. This is love, momma. Some kind of... wonderful, crazy stupid love, actually.” - Heart Eyes
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