Valentine (2001)

Valentine arrives in 2001 as a slasher film assembled from familiar parts: a Cupid mask, a holiday, a group of female friends in San Francisco, and a killer with a grudge dating back to a middle school dance. The critical consensus at the time was dismissive, and the film earned it. Four credited writers produced a screenplay whose mystery nobody seems invested in solving, and the kills are staged with more care than the characters. The film does possess, in modest quantities, an interest in how men treat women, and how women absorb that treatment over the years.

Retrospective criticism has been kinder, and some of it has reframed the picture as a feminist slasher, pointing to its female ensemble and its attention to the small harassments and threats that shape the women's daily lives. That reading is defensible without being fully earned. The film observes male-female dynamics with a certain cruelty and never articulates a thesis about them. The closest it comes to a social argument is Dorothy, whose resentment over being seen as the fat girl drives the final act. Weight stigma is present and named, but the film treats it as a motive for murder, not as a wrong to be corrected. This is not a body-positive text.

Beyond those two threads, the film carries almost no cultural freight. The cast is uniformly white, the story has no interest in race, and no character is written as queer. There is no environmental anxiety, no class consciousness, no neurodivergent identity, no historical revisionism, and no sermonizing. The con-artist subplot involving Campbell exists to generate suspects and nothing else. Valentine wants to scare its audience and occasionally unsettle it, and it is honest about that ambition. For a film so often accused of being behind the times, it is at least not pretending to be anything else.