Review: Drop

Director:  Christopher Landon

Stars:  Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Gabrielle Ryan

Studio schedulers are missing a trick right now. First Novocaine revealed itself to be a Christmas film hiding in plain sight, and now Drop screams “perfect for a Valentine’s Day release” as it scaffolds a high-concept tech-based thriller around a candlelit first date. Well, it’s here now. One of the few alternatives to the box office pillaging A Minecraft Movie. We should probably consider ourselves lucky. 

Meet Violet (Meghann Fahy), a victim of terrifying domestic violence who has turned her life around. She and her son Toby (Jacob Robinson) have a happy home, and she’s turned her attention to counselling others out of the same hole. What’s missing – especially as far as her sister Jen (Violett Beane) is concerned – is a man. Violet’s been on the apps, matched with a romantic potential, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), and tonight is their first date – at a swanky Chicago high-rise restaurant called Palate. But Violet’s evening is going to be thrown into chaos when she starts receiving a series of anonymous ‘drops’ – localised instant messages – revealing that her son and babysitting sister are hostages who will be killed unless she does exactly as she’s told. Like, for instance, murder her date. It must be someone in her immediate vicinity pulling the strings, but who?

Christopher Landon’s made a breezy career of popcorn genre flicks since breaking out with Happy Death Day in 2017, and Drop sees him continue apace. Like thrillers ranging from Phone Booth to Trap, it’s a set-up designed to make use of a series of geographical constraints. We’re effectively tied to the restaurant for the duration. But Landon also arrives here having escaped the highly contentious seventh Scream film, and has managed to land himself another dopey whodunnit. The restaurant setting is pretty useful for this. All sorts of unknown characters, from fellow patrons to the over-familiar staff. There’s enough gas in the tank to occupy a tight 90-minuter. 

The chemistry between Fahy and Sklenar is a little stilted, but that’s perfectly befitting of a first date. In the second act, when they get a chance to connect and bare their souls a little, the actors get to play in a more intimate register together. It’s relatively brief, but it’s well played. Fahy plays Violet as an openly wounded soul, not yet recovered from the harrowing events that left her a widow, and you can feel Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s screenplay leaning on this throughout in accordance with modern genre movie trends. Tonight’s gauntlet will, it promises, finally free Violet from her psychological bondage.

With the stakes appropriately high for Violet, Fahy’s desperation throughout is understandable. What’s less credulous is Henry’s patience and ambivalence as his date repeatedly flips her shit in a public place. But Sklenar’s aloof responses might also be a canny bit of work to keep us guessing whether Henry’s in on it all somehow, as our attention darts from one suspect to the next. That is, so long as you haven’t figured it out from the get-go (sometimes casting really is its own red flag).

The aforementioned Trap is a decent point of reference for what to expect here, overall. As with Shyamalan’s latest, there’s a tacit agreement being made between the filmmakers and the audience to ‘go with it’ and leave good portions of common sense at home. The reveal and the extent of the set-up, when they come, are so ludicrously elaborate as to seem laughable. And, disappointingly, thematically irrelevant.

But Drop would rather you forget about that and enjoy the presentation. As with a lot of high-end dining, the first bite is with the eye. Landon isn’t quite a stylistic match for Shyamalan (at least not here), but Drop remains clean, glossy and never less than functional. The decision to paint the restaurant walls with the drop messages as Violet reads them is the film’s biggest serve, and its fancifully garish. 

Like Trap, Drop finally escapes its own one-location conceit for a bit of frantic crosstown action and a reckoning at the family home. But here it’s a little rushed. A calamitous after-thought to get us to the inevitable coda. It’s not a disastrous fumble, but where Trap luxuriated in this section – in it’s balletic sense of goof – Drop feels hurried and breathless. 

Once again Landon has hit a comfortable, palatable middle ground of juicy entertainment that can be enjoyed and discarded, mostly without a second thought. The woolly ambitions around empowerment here are noted but Violet’s sense of gumption never fully crystalises. Drop is more Happy Meal than fine dining. But sometimes that’s just what you want.