Christopher Landon’s Drop has one of those eye-catching, high-concept-yet-relatable premises that the extremely online moviegoer begs for but very rarely pays money to see. “Hey,” it says to the viewer, “have you ever had dumbass kids Airdrop you inappropriate memes in public places? You have? Well, what if those kids were trying to get you to murder someone? And, if you didn’t, your whole family would die?” That, my friends, is what we call a motherfucking hook. Landon’s quickly becoming the king of shit like this — taking the Groundhog Day premise and transforming it into the wild and wonderful Happy Death Day movies or the body-swapping antics of Freaky — and Drop only helps to continue the trend with its blend of Hitchcock-like plotting and high-camp hysterics.
Violet (Meghann Fahy), a psychologist and therapist specializing in trauma, finally decides it’s time to put herself back out there and meet people. It’s been a few years now since her husband died — his abuse was the whole reason she switched disciplines and devoted herself to helping those in situations once like her own — and it looks like she’s hit the jackpot in Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a photographer in Chicago’s mayoral office. They meet at one of those Windows on the World type restaurants high above the city streets, and despite a little first-date awkwardness, it looks like it’ll be a great evening. Until she starts getting drops from one of the other diners (or the wait staff). It’s annoying at first, but it takes a turn when the messages tell her to look at her home security cameras: there’s a ski-masked man holding a silenced pistol in her kitchen, right below her son’s bedroom. The messages tell her to do what he says and not draw any attention, or the kid dies.
What our mystery patron wants from Violet slowly becomes clear. At first, they want her to smash his camera’s SD card — simple enough, if weird. Then they want her to pour some poison into his drink, which is, well, a bit of an ask. Violet’s smart and resourceful and does not want to kill this very nice-seeming man, but she’s also a mom who very nearly lost her kid to her dead husband in the midst of his rages. So, she’s trapped, with a seemingly omniscient ghoul watching over her, critiquing her conduct, always messaging her to remind her that her child will die if she does anything wrong or out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, Henry’s just puzzled — his date is acting strangely, and he has no idea why, though he can guess, given that she is a widow on her first date with someone in a long time. But his patience has a limit, and, of course, if he leaves the table, he doesn’t know that her son will get shot. So, get ready to squirm in your seat as Violet tries to extricate herself without having a loved one — or a potential lover — die.
It’s a perpetual motion machine of a script; once the pieces are in order, screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach really try to consider all of her avenues for escape and show us the practicality of just how someone could plausibly set this scenario up. There are a few hiccups in which the film stumbles trying to add unnecessary comic relief (one good thing about Hitch was that he’d frontload the humor and settle into a more serious tone as a picture went on), but the central tension remains intact for Landon to work his magic with. All of his prior films were well-cast, and Drop is no exception. Fahy and Sklenar are a winning pairing, effortlessly papering over the more wooden bits of dialogue with charisma or adrenaline. It’s delightfully frustrating to see just how trapped and unfair the situation is for Fahy, and she remains a constantly empathic presence. There’s a certain amount of schadenfreude to her predicament — the secondhand cringe that comes with someone intentionally embarrassing themselves is often somewhat funny until it turns dreadful and desperate — and Fahy and Landon make the most of it. Though this is a single-location two-hander, it never stops feeling cinematic, with Landon’s camerawork being smart and steady, occasionally reaching for the more avant-garde flourish, such as a darkened zoom-out of Violet alone at her table, spotlighted as her surroundings are shrouded in a sea of black.
Let’s be real: These are just nice little touches complementing a genuinely audience-engaging thriller. Even when the movie descends into cacophonous action and goes hard unexpectedly — you won’t believe how well they use that skyscraper — it’s still smarter than the average fare and plenty entertaining. With Drop, you get what it promises on the tin — a goofy, well-constructed roller coaster with the lightest safety bars. Plus, there’s the added benefit of being able to laugh at the fact that Apple wouldn’t let them use Airdrop or iOS in any way, presumably because there’s a hypothetical iPhone user with bad intentions that they’re trying to fight. That’s worth 90 minutes of laughs and then some.