Violet’s first date jitters are made worse due to mysterious instructions sent to her phone in Christopher Landon’s tight, intense horror-thriller.
Trigger warning: Domestic violence
I love a great high-concept horror-thriller. I slide Drop under the horror umbrella, but my brim is wide. Your definition will vary, but Drop is a gripping thrill no matter your classification. Before I get into the details, from Violet receiving her first drop-message from a stranger to the crowd-pleasing conclusion, the film grips on and doesn’t let go. At just over ninety minutes, director Christopher Landon and writers Jillian Jacobs & Christopher Roach update the “wrong-man/forced-into-it” type story to a solid modernization of the concept.
It’s been 3 years since Violet has been out of the house socially. A survivor of abuse from a dead husband, her time is spent as a therapist and a mother for a five-year-old son. Already tense from her past, and the situation, essentially meeting a stranger (they’ve been talking for three months), it becomes terrible when she starts receiving drop messages from an unknown, starting with memes over her situation and ramping to threats against her and her family at home (sister is home babysitting).
I’m old, turning 43 on the day the movie releases theatrically, and I’ll admit the ability to drop messages like this is new to me. But the characters are around my age or older, and everyone else seems aware, so it’s a technology blind spot for me. Still, anonymous drops are a clever method for driving this subgenre. Each “ding” and vibration from her phone as a new command, comment, threat, or otherwise ups the tension of what it will contain and what terrible thing she might be forced to do.
Drop is a very driven film. The tension builds beautifully at each set-up, pay-off, larger dangers, and asks from the unseen threat. It wouldn’t work without the correct lead. It all rests on Meghann Fahy’s extraordinarily capable shoulders. We feel the inherent nervousness of the onset, and see a very different take as the stakes are increased (a gunman holds her sister and son hostage at home), and paranoia sets in. Who can she trust, and how does she take each interaction? She plays her concern without sliding into over-acting hysterics in big moments, but also not flattening. It’s a fine line between underplaying and reaching unintentionally cheesy. Fahy plays the right level of vulnerable, but tough.
Her ability to play everything she’s feeling on multiple levels is enough to get the job done. But she has Landon’s craft to back her up. Landon has proven to have a fantastic grasp of the genre, its ins and outs, and how to manipulate the audience across the Happy Death Day films, Freaky, and as a writer of this year’s Heart Eyes. In Drop, he creates an exquisite visual world, working in tandem with Violet’s mental state. The primary setting is fancy restaurant, isolated by the sheer height, 36 stories, quite the …drop (heh) threatening by the large windows, but open in floor plan allows XX to watch and be watched by everyone Despite the open visual of the restaurant, the production design looms with entrapping arcs, slowly enclosing our heroine, light use highlights her fears, moods, suspects, and thoughts. Quick edits disorient the viewer. I’m always a fan of displaying visuals of screen components to avoid all being read aloud or quickly shown; Landon’s use highlights and hides details in clever ways, also building the mood. This all works together to create a thrilling tension as she works the details to figure out the why and how to get herself and her family out of it. It’s finely done, but familiar.
Landon’s direction and Fahy’s performance mask some script issues from Jacobs and Roach. I disliked their previous films of Truth or Dare and Fantasy Island, both messy fluff of scripts; but Drop is solid, straightforward, and despite the high-concept premise, definitely simple. Although Drop mostly runs through the scenario with controlled skills, it finds familiar beats, sometimes obvious red herrings, and an awkwardly handled reveal. Many story points are a little pat, things falling exactly as needed on a timeline or movement, but as this is a high-concept flick, some things one must let slide to keep it moving.
Even with those noted marks, I was all in and invested, with plenty of surprises. A fine set of actors play their limited, specifically designed parts well, no one tips their hand obviously, and I genuinely was unsure of it all as it played. At the top of those is Brandon Sklenar as the date, taking most of what Fahy puts out with easy chemistry. The built-in misdirects work. It’s a wonderful game of who knows what, and how much; is it one person, a group of them, ALL of them? I appreciate avoiding easy humor to release tension. One character meant to be laughed at, but instead, this ups the tension.
Drop is a fun, tense ride. Any scripting faults or shortcuts are covered by Landon and Fahy, in the driven, pulsing visual world he creates for Fahy to anchor with a great performance. Sure Drop is a gimmick based popcorn thriller but it’s a damned good one.