Directed by: Rod Singh
Genre: Romantic Drama, Coming-of-Age
Streaming On: Vivamax
The film ‘Heart Eyes’ is set to release in 2025 and is a Filipino romantic drama directed by Rod Singh. It narrates the emotionally stirring journey of a high school girl dealing with first love, self-doubt, and coming of age. Set in the bustling corners of a city high school, the film reveals how desire and vulnerability permeate the lives of the youth. Heart Eyes offers an infatuation-filled raw yet honest glimpse into the heart of a girl who teeters on the fragile line between love and fantasy.
📝 Plot Summary (Clean Version)
The plot continues to develop as it merges with the life of Mika, an overly protective reserved high school girl who lives with her aunt. Her world completely alters when she meets Leo the transferee who is both confident and charismatic. It does not take long for Leo to gain popularity amongst students Leo. For Mika, Leo quickly becomes more than just a crush.
Her admiration from afar grows into innocent attempts to get Leo’s attention in the form of daydreams. However naive but sweet Mika makes an effort to controlling her feelings, soon her imagination and reality blend. admiration transforms into obsession and for Mika, this is difficult to process and their understanding is limited, which drives her to confront feelings within herself that are difficult to deal with.
As she gets engrossed in the film, it forces her to come to terms with the emotional wounds she carries,, staring into her insides, reckoning with being emotionally underdeveloped, feeling profound loneliness and deep unrelenting thirsts for validation. It is about gaining self value, crushing heartbreak, and coming of age when you tenderly realize that sometimes love hurts too and it’s to free yourself to mend the pieces.
🎭 Major Characters
Mika (Adriana So) — A quiet student who is soft-spoken. She lives in a world of imaginations and captures herself in dreams as she struggles heavily with abstraction. It is this world that soothes the harsh conditions of her life marked with doubt, despair, and feelings of hopelessness but thankfully, transformation and healing happen too.
Leo (Wilbert Ross) — A well mannered and consierate newcomer to the school with a charming smile who becomes the object of attention in no time makes him the new sensation in class. forever the kind gent he is comes clueless when it comes to Mikas infatuation. It is this ignorance that deepens Mika’s spiral of emotions and fantasies.
Aunt Mayette (Marissa Sanchez) — The one that serves as a blend of guardian and additional parental figure for Mika, is a strict guardian. Aunt Mika endlessly do her best to comprehend the internal indifference between tenderness and harshness her niece suffers.
🎥 Direction and Visual Style
Rod Singh’s direction embodies the precision of capturing teenage fragility. Mika’s world is rendered visually intimate through the use of tight close-ups, soft lighting, and dreamy cinematography. Singh’s direction meticulously blurs the distinction between reality and imagination to make the audience feel what Mika feels.
Mika’s fluid emotional transitions are reflected in the blend of the mundane and the magical. While rugged, the school setting is grounded in reality — a stark contrast to the romanticized lens through which Mika views Leo.
🎵 Music and Sound
Heart Eyes’ soundtrack is a masterpiece in itself — gentle acoustic melodies, minimalist background scores, and deliberate silences underscore the intensity of emotion in every scene. Mika’s emotional highs and lows are accompanied by a recurring piano theme, while ambient sound fills the silences and moments of yearning.
Sound design largely avoids over-dramatization and lets the rawness of unspoken emotion do most of the storytelling.
🔍 Themes and Messages
- Unspoken Emotions – The film focuses on emotional suppression, emphasizing how internally chaotic one becomes when there is no means to process emotions.
- Fantasy vs Reality – Mika’s story is a depiction of how unfettered intense admiration can distort one’s perception, blurring the lines between reality and expectation.
- Self-Validation – The primary self-discovery that Mika learns in the story is the realization that she has to validate herself instead of relying on others’ love and affection.
- Mental Health Awareness – Heart Eyes touches in a nuanced manner on emotional health, anxiety in adolescence, and the need to seek help or express oneself.
- Letting Go – Love at an early age is often an exercise in getting to know yourself rather than an attempt to win over someone.
🎞 Reception and Audience
This is not another typical teenage high school romance. The narrative of Heart Eyes is more about the introspection and emotional experience of a young girl, than it is about love. The film was enjoyed by older teens and young adults who found the film’s tone realistic and restrained.
Critics pointed out the subtle but powerful performance of Adriana So and the film’s use of emotional vulnerability and expressed that the film did not resort to melodrama. Heart Eyes does seem to be a lesser teen romance but the film earned critics’ respect for bold storytelling and a sincere emotional tone.
📚 Reflections for Young Viewers
It’s perfectly fine to emotionally invest yourself in something, but it is just as important to have a grasp on your own feelings.
Admiring someone doesn’t equate to losing your identity as a person.
Not every act of care and kindness needs to be reciprocated with love.
Discussing issues with an adult or a trusted person can prove to be very helpful as compared to enduring in silence.
While having fantasies is completely safe, being immersed in them for a prolonged period of time can be detrimental.
💭 Final Reflections
A tender heart can be a brutal weapon; the film weaves a stunning tapestry of first love, the harsh emotional rollercoaster accompanying it, and the silent conflicts adolescents face. The movie doesn’t feature any high-stakes arguments or over-the-top declarations of love, and that’s where its true beauty lies. It explores, with remarkable gentleness, how deeply love, especially when one-sided, affects a person’s development and growth.
The film does not romanticize the unhealthy obsession and emotional turmoil, but rather highlights how utterly captivating those things can be. Through the eyes of Mika, the audience is reminded that while romance is alluring, self-love, healing, and emotional clarity are invaluable treasures.
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