Over the years, horror juggernauts Blumhouse Productions have built a stable of creatives that they’ve been able to pull from to make their movies. So, what do they get when they team up director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones) with writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach (Fantasy Island and Truth or Dare)? They get their newest suspense flick, Drop.
Drop is about a young, widowed mother named Violet (Meghann Fahy from The White Lotus) who, in an effort to jumpstart her social life, makes a date on a dating app with a guy named Henry (Brandon Sklenar from 1923). The two meet at a romantic high-rise restaurant, and things seem to be going well. Except for the fact that their date is constantly being interrupted by someone who keeps sending Violet photo drops on her phone. The drops go from annoying to threatening, and finally they wind up giving her tasks to complete without anyone else in the restaurant knowing. If she doesn’t? The dropper will kill her young son.
If that sounds a bit familiar, it’s because Jacobs’ and Roach’s script for Drop owes a debt of gratitude to Wes Craven’s 2005 thriller Red Eye. But, since we’re a generation removed from that awesome movie, we’re going to forgive.
The setup for Drop is captivating. The anonymity of the villain who is manipulating Violet is a nightmare, causing anxiety about not only social media and online dating but privacy in general. The movie is an exercise in paranoia, with the single location trapping the viewer with Violet. Landon cleverly uses graphic overlays to show communication between the heroine and the villain in order to move the story along and even uses some visual tricks to facilitate red herrings and false alarms to keep the mystery going. It all works well to build momentum for the first two acts.
Unfortunately, Drop falls apart in the third. It feels like Jacobs and Roach wrote themselves into a corner and didn’t quite know how to get Violet out of her situation in a satisfying way. The stakes keep rising over the course of the narrative, and things get more and more ridiculous, which in itself isn’t entirely bad. That makes for a fun movie. But, in Drop’s case, things eventually kind of snap, and it goes from fun to just plain corny.
Now, none of this is Christopher Landon’s fault. His direction is solid, and he makes the most out of what he was given. Neither does the blame for this shift fall at the feet of Meghann Fahy or Brandon Sklenar, both of whom are terrific at portraying the most awkward first date ever. Bonus points go to Jeffery Self (Search Party) who plays the couple’s waiter and both observes the awkwardness and contributes to it with his over-the-top performance. Matt the waiter is all of us watching these poor people try to get through a date under these unusual circumstances.
No, the flaws in Drop are squarely in the screenplay. It’s one of those movies that keeps supplying information and sneakily providing clues in a way that has the audience just hoping and praying that it’s able to reel it all in and stick the landing, and unfortunately, it doesn’t.
Drop is 3/4ths of a good movie. It starts out very strong but slowly peters out. It’s worth seeing just for the setup and the cool premise, just don’t expect these characters to find a logical way out of their predicament. It’s no Red Eye. It’s more of a Phone Booth or a Grand Piano. It works until it doesn’t.
GRADE: C+
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, sexual references, strong violent content, and suicide
Release Date: April 11, 2025
Running Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Studio: Universal Pictures
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