Drop Makes The Most Of Its Barebones Premise
Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon executes an efficient, entertaining little thriller.
Christopher Landon has a gift for making highly enjoyable movies out of a snappy premise. “What if a slasher was also Groundhog Day?” was the clever premise of his wildly entertaining breakout hit Happy Death Day, while its even better sequel asked, “What if it was also Back to the Future?” Meanwhile, his charming comedy-horror Freaky asked, “What if a slasher was also a body-swap comedy?” But there’s only so many “what if a slasher was also something else” hypotheticals that Landon can make a career out of, so his latest film, Drop, cleverly does away with the cutesty premise and goes back to basics.
In Drop, which is written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, Violet (Meghann Fahey) is a widow whose relationship with her abusive husband came to a violent end — after threatening their young son, he shot himself. But Violet has turned her life around: she’s now a counselor for fellow domestic abuse survivors, and she’s about to go on her first date in years. Violet is understandably nervous about being apart from her son, but her fears are soon assuaged by her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), who is charming and sincere, and even brings a gift for her son. And then, things start to go horribly wrong.
From the beginning of her date, Violet starts to receive strange anonymous “Digi-drops” (the in-world stand-in for Apple’s Airdrop technology), that start out as dumb, crass memes, and steadily become more threatening. When one drop orders her to turn on her home cameras, she’s horrified to see a masked gunman in her house. Do as I say, the mysterious sender of the drops tells her, or we’ll murder your son. The anonymous blackmailer then gives Violet a horrible order: she needs to kill her date before the end of the night.
Once you learn what the premise of Drop is, there’s not much more to the movie. It’s a claustrophobic psychological thriller between a woman and her phone, set primarily in one absurdly high-rise restaurant. It takes a good director to make an entertaining movie out of such a barebones premise, and Landon proves he’s got the stuff. His direction is, on one hand, pretty broad: When Violet enters the restaurant, every person she interacts with — from the bartender, to the lounge pianist, to the tech bro she bumps into, to the bumbling older man nervous about his blind date — gets a weird amount of screen time, as if to say “Here is suspect number 2!” But as the stakes get higher, Landon ups his directorial flair.
Because of the limited location, Landon and his cinematographer Marc Spicer have to get creative with their camera. When Violet runs out into the lobby at one point, the camera flies overhead as if to imitate her discombobulated feeling. Landon and Spicer make frequent use of spotlights, Dutch angles, and extreme low close-ups, all to embed us in Violet’s distressing experience of being alone in the world. Landon even throws in a POV shot from a glass — just for kicks. They’re slightly gimmicky tricks, yes, but they’re what make Drop such an entertaining watch.
Drop is also a blissfully short 95 minutes long, though you may wonder how Landon can even drag out this premise for longer than an hour without putting Violet through some unhinged antics. He does this by intercutting the present action with flashbacks to Violet’s traumatic past — namely, the film’s opening scene in which Violet’s husband threatens to murder her and her son, before ultimately shooting himself. Landon draws a connection between Violet’s status as a domestic abuse survivor and her ability to navigate this terrible situation, though this thematic through-line does get a bit heavy-handed.
Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar) on their no-good, very bad date.
But there’s fun to be had in how Landon stages the twists and turns of this movie. He mines impressive amounts of suspense out of Violet and Henry switching tables, and manages to turn the film’s comedic relief — a new waiter who can’t wait to show off his improv skills to Violet and Henry — into a ticking time bomb of tension.
The only major issue with the movie is how much it’s focused on its premise, and on Violet. Everyone else, even Henry and Violet’s babysitter sister (Violett Beane) come off as little more than archetypes. Henry, as the target of Violet’s anonymous blackmailer, feels frustratingly opaque, despite how charming Sklenar’s performance is. Why is he worth the trouble of this ridiculously complex assassination attempt? And how has he not left this date yet, with how obviously strange Violet has been acting? Drop starts to push the limits of reason, but thankfully, it comes to its climax before you start to question things too much.
And once it does hit its climax, it becomes clear that Drop comes from the same heightened realities that Landon’s previous films live in, with the film taking a sudden turn for the absurd, (complete with a standoff that feels almost like it came straight out of Die Hard). But Landon isn’t trying to tell any cautionary tale about how terrifying our new digital reality is, or about the dangers of eating at a restaurant that’s way too high. Drop comes from that same group of hypotheticals as his greatest hits: What if someone blackmailed you into killing your first date? And the answer is a fun, efficient little thriller.
