First dates are hit or miss, but few turn out as horribly as Violet’s (Meghann Fahy) evening on the town in Drop.
Wading back into the dating pool following the death of her husband, the newly single Chicagoan winds up in a world of 21st-century trouble in Christopher Landon’s thriller, which goes for Hitchcock-via-De Palma and throws in a dash of Trap for good giddy measure. Sharp and tense if not quite as inventive as the director’s prior Happy Death Day and Freaky, the movie, which hits theaters April 11, is a canny cautionary tale about the perils of looking for Mr. Right—and of keeping your phone powered on at dinner.
Drop introduces Violet as she awakens on the floor of a foyer, her face bloodied and her body battered. Crawling along a rug, she’s confronted by a mysterious man who, after some threatening gibberish, hands her a pistol and dares her to pull the trigger.
Before she makes her choice, the film cuts to Violet using Zoom to counsel a therapy patient who’s struggling to come to grips with past abuse. Clearly, Violet knows whereof she speaks. Still, with her trauma seemingly buried deep beneath the surface, she endeavors to give love another go, leaving her five-year-old boy Toby (Jacob Robinson) with her sister Jen (Violett Beane)—who shrewdly advises her to ditch her weirdo outfits for a low-cut red dress—and heads to posh restaurant Palate on the top floor of a swanky high-rise.
There, she plans to meet Henry (Brandon Sklenar), whom she’s connected with on a dating app. Nervous about this first face-to-face get-together, Violet arrives on time, only to learn that Henry is running late. Entering the establishment, she bumps into a stranger who’s similarly consumed by his handheld device, and at the bar, she’s greeted by Richard (Reed Diamond), who mistakenly thinks that she’s his blind date. In both cases, Violet thinks little about these encounters, but given the proceedings’ suspenseful nature, they’re both laced with hints of suspicious menace, as if their apparent triviality is masking their underlying importance.
While ordering a Malbec from the friendly bartender (Gabrielle Ryan Spring) and ignoring the advances of the creepy pianist (Ed Weeks), Violet begins receiving AirDrop messages (hence the film’s title) from an anonymous sender, who wants to engage her in some sort of chat.
Unsurprisingly, she ignores these missives, assuming they’re pranks. However, once Henry finally shows, apologizing for his tardiness, they accelerate. At their table, whose window view of the glittering downtown Chicago skyline is at once striking and vertiginous, the duo’s attempts at meet-cute small talk are repeatedly stymied by Violet’s buzzing cell. Since the sender must be within 50 feet (due to technological constraints), the two set about trying to deduce—with minimal success—who in the restaurant might be the culprit behind this aggravating spamming.
Violet and Henry make for a fetching pair, yet sparks don’t fly between them, too busy is Drop harassing its protagonist with ceaseless texts, whose tenor quickly goes south. Much to her chagrin, Violet is informed by this unknown virtual assailant that her phone has been cloned, her home security system has been hacked, and a masked and armed man has broken into her kitchen and will kill her son unless she complies with his wishes—which include staying put in the restaurant and making sure that Henry doesn’t leave. Worse, she soon deduces that she’s being watched and listened to via devices carefully hidden all over the place.
Violet is a rat in a cage, forced to do as her tormentor demands, and Drop amplifies the urgency and gravity of her predicament with amusing swiftness. Be it an overly chatty waiter (Jeffery Self) or a cold maître d’, everyone in the restaurant is a suspect, and Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s script affords each person with dialogue that could potentially be read as harmless or ominous.
This also, of course, goes for Henry, whose good-guy routine is deliberately difficult to judge and whose interest in Violet’s AirDrop problems comes across as possibly nefarious. Panicked and bewildered, Violet initially tries to play along, staging a lost-watch ruse so she can get ahold of an SD card in Henry’s camera. That’s merely the tip of the iceberg for the increasingly harried character, who’s soon tasked with taking deadly action in order to save the ones she loves.
Drop sprinkles clues about why Violet is being manipulated like a puppet, most of them having to do with Henry’s job as a photographer for the mayor’s office. Nonetheless, deciphering real-deal hints from red herrings proves entertainingly difficult, with Landon maintaining just enough doubt to keep things edgy.
From reverse zooms that strand a shrinking Violet in darkness, to texts that materialize on screen (as if they were physically threatening her), to a slow-motion kiss that silences the restaurant’s din and keeps things on track, the director’s stewardship is playfully stylish, not to mention spry and efficient, wasting not a single gesture on extraneous asides.
The fact that Violet and Henry are constantly leaving their dining table is an unavoidably ridiculous element of Drop, and reminiscent of Josh Hartnett going back and forth (and back and forth, and back and forth) from his concert seat in M. Night Shyamalan’s most recent feature.
The film’s ability to up the ante, however, makes such narrative contrivances easy to overlook, as does Fahy’s performance as a woman coping with a dilemma designed to test her domestic abuse-survivor mettle. In the wake of her breakthrough turn in The White Lotus’ second season, the actress gives a sturdy performance which grounds the twisty-turn action, even though her chemistry with Henry (played, dully, by Sklenar) is somewhat lacking.
Drop is another creative genre affair for Landon, establishing him as a director with a gift for taking familiar material and warping it into delirious nightmares. His latest never goes fully mad, instead resorting to a relatively easy and middling answer to its central question, and finishing with an egregiously cheesy coda.
Those mild climactic slip-ups prevent it from reaching the heights of the filmmaker’s best efforts, but they aren’t enough to negate the dizzying kicks of the preceding chaos. Pulpy and punchy, it’s a dating-nightmare thriller that, ironically, should make for excellent date-night viewing.
