A single mother goes on a blind date only to find herself terrorised by a
series of increasingly menacing "drops" to her cellphone.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Christopher Landon
Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Skienar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Ed Weeks
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.
Drop is in UK/ROI cinemas from
April 11th.
