You know you're out of touch when a movie introduces you to a piece of technology to which you're oblivious, but which everyone in the movie is entirely familiar with. That's the case with Drop, a thriller centred around 'DigiDrop', a fictional cousin of the iPhone's AirDrop feature. As someone who views a phone as a necessary evil (if I could live without one in 2025 I gladly would), I had never encountered the concept of "drops," which I now know are messages sent between iPhones (via bluetooth?) within a certain distance of one another.
Drop uses these drops the way Jaume Collet-Serra's recent airport thriller Carry-On deployed phone calls, as a means for some unseen antagonist to manipulate a clueless protagonist into helping them pull off an awful crime.
The heroine here is Violet (Meghann Fahy), a survivor of domestic abuse who now works as a therapist for other survivors. Having avoided male company for several years, Violet has finally decided to get back out in the world and go on a date with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), the handsome photographer she has been messaging online for several months.
Leaving her young son Toby (Jacob Robinson) at home with her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane), Violet heads to Palate, a swishy new restaurant located on the top floor of a Chicago skyscraper. Once there she's happy to see that Henry actually looks like his online photos, but she becomes perturbed by a series of increasingly sinister drops to her phone. Trying to figure out who might be responsible (it has to be someone in the restaurant) makes for a nice bonding exercise between Violet and Henry, but things quickly escalate when Violet is made aware that a masked man has entered her home, knocked out Jen and is awaiting the order to murder Toby if Violet doesn't follow a set of instructions which ultimately lead to her being asked to fatally poison Henry.
Director Christopher Landon made his name by revitalising the horror-comedy sub-genre with movies like Happy Death Day, Freaky and his script for the recent Heart Eyes. Landon's horror-comedies work because he strikes just the right balance between horror and comedy. They're the modern equivalent of the Abbot & Costello Universal monsters comedies in that they pit comic protagonists against villains who would slot right into a straight ahead horror movie. Aside from a wisecracking waiter, there's practically no comedy in Landon's latest, but in Violet and Henry we have a couple who wouldn't be out of place in a rom-com. That Landon makes us root for Violet and Henry to hit it off along with staying alive is testament to how good he is at striking this precarious balance, though credit must also go to writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach.
I've seen Drop described elsewhere as Hitchcockian, but Landon keeps us guessing throughout as to the identity of the villainous drop-sender, whereas Hitchcock would have revealed them by at least the end of the first act. Instead, Drop is a whodunit in which the murder has yet to happen, and much of the tension comes from Violet and the audience trying to figure out who among the diners or waiting staff might be the one terrorising her. One of Landon's first scripts was the very Hitchcockian Disturbia, a teen thriller reworking of Rear Window. Landon calls back to Rear Window here with the variety of potential suspects laid out like the residents of the apartment block Jimmy Stewart famously snoops on in the Hitchcock thriller. Those suspects range from a suspicious lone male diner (Travis Nelson) and an aging man on a disastrous blind date (Reed Diamond) to a nosy barmaid (Gabrielle Ryan Spring) and a flirtatious pianist (Ed Weeks).
Where Drop most resembles Hitchcock is in its use of a bespoke constructed set. The restaurant is clearly a studio-bound set, but Landon takes full advantage with some theatrical lighting that he uses to highlight key details in the manner of German expressionism. There's something almost daring in how Landon commits to what is a very old school technique, one modern audiences weaned on "realistic" lighting might cynically scoff at. He's clearly aiming to please cinephiles, but his movie should pull in mainstream viewers starved of thrillers of this nature.
Something else Landon shares with Hitchcock is his fondness for blonde leading ladies. Fahy follows Happy Death Day's Jessica Rothe and Freaky's Kathryn Newton in delivering what feels like a star-making turn (I can't understand how Rothe's career hasn't exploded). Despite looking like a Fox News presenter, Fahy manages to convincingly convey Violet's vulnerability and her timing suggests she might easily adapt to comedy.
Giving Violet a traumatic past might initially feel like timely MeToo box-ticking, but it adds an extra unsettling element to the narrative. Violet's inability to cry out for help plays like a metaphor for being under the control of a manipulative abuser. Drop wisely avoids the sort of extended flashbacks a less confident version of this story might have opted for (I'll always have a soft spot for Shyamalan, but I know he would have messed this up), instead putting faith in its lead actress to get across the idea that this isn't Violet's first rodeo when it comes to being controlled by an abusive antagonist. That Drop raises such a heavy issue as domestic abuse while remaining a fun rollercoaster thriller speaks volumes to Landon's ability to juggle tones and themes, an area in which many of his contemporaries flounder.
Directed by: Christopher Landon
Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Skienar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Ed Weeks
