A single mother on her first date since the death of her ex-husband is forced to play a deadly game in Drop, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend after premiering at SXSW in March. This kind of high-concept premise goes back to at least Phone Booth and has been utilized as recently as Netflix’s Carry-On, but a unique setting, taut direction, and engaging performances keep Drop compulsively watchable despite an underwritten script that leans far too heavily on familiar thriller tropes.
Drop stars Meghann Fahy as Violet, a widow and survivor of an abusive relationship who is about to go on her first date since the death of her ex-husband. In the film’s opening scenes, sister Jen (Violett Beane) comes to babysit young son Toby (Jacob Robinson) while Violet prepares to go on her first date with a photographer she met through a dating app.
But before the charming Henry (Brandon Sklenar) can even show up to the luxurious penthouse restaurant overlooking the city (Drop was shot in Dublin, standing in for an unnamed U.S. locale), Violet receives a threatening message via DigiDrop—the movie’s version of Apple’s AirDrop, which is so prevalent that almost everyone in the restaurant seems to have it—and the game is afoot.
Drop doesn’t quite seem to understand how Airdrop works: Violet receives a DigiDrop message request that also includes a threatening meme, which is presumably the content of the message. So despite declining each request, she still gets the message from a random stranger who is less than 15 meters away. Later, when she starts accepting the requests, all she gets is a short string of text; is the stalker still prefacing each one with a meme created on the spot? Drop only makes use of the AirDrop premise when Henry and Violet attempt to pinpoint the location of the stalker by walking around the restaurant.
Violet soon learns that this isn’t some lone weirdo: it’s all part of an elaborate plan that includes a masked man holding her sister and son hostage at home, and every inch of the restaurant monitored by camera and/or hidden microphones. She has to do exactly what the AirDrop stalker wants, and she cannot call for help, or let anyone else in the restaurant, including Henry, know what’s going on.
Drop should be a lot of fun, and for a while, it is: we want to find out exactly what is happening here, and work with Violet on a potential solution. Tight direction from Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day) keeps us on our toes for a good 75 minutes, and both Fahy (who starred in the second season of The White Lotus) and Sklenar (1923) are especially appealing leads.
But the screenplay, by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach (Fantasy Island, Truth or Dare) just doesn’t give Violet enough to do: she scans the restaurant for the stalker, thinks about asking for help, but largely just does what she’s told, because there’s a guy at home with a gun to her son’s head. Films like Phone Booth and Carry-On work because the hero slowly learns about the villains and eventually outsmarts them despite their limitations, but that never really happens here.
Instead, Drop just has Violet go with the flow for most of the running time, before an abrupt conclusion that suddenly turns her into an action hero—and any credibility the film might have had quite literally goes out the window. There are so many baffling elements in the film’s final 15 minutes, from the utter insanity of the stalker’s over-elaborate plan, to a mask reveal that generates confusion and the appearance of a Chekhov’s gun that the movie forgot to properly introduce, that we feel guilty for enjoying the previous 75.
Despite the quality of the filmmaking and a pair of appealing performances, the script drops the ball to an extent that makes the movie difficult to recommend. Drop is the kind of slick thriller that critics might call a ‘turn your brain off’ ride, but you might need to be in a coma to meet the viewing conditions for this one. One final aside: the film’s brief but graphic depictions of domestic violence and threats against young children are far too intense for what is otherwise a lightweight thriller.
