It’s a good thing director Christopher Landon‘s exit from the “Scream” franchise cleared his schedule: The punchy if risible single-location thriller “Drop” delivers a far more pleasurable jolt than any I.P. could have. Here, “The Bold Type” and “The White Lotus” TV comedy breakout Meghann Fahy proves herself a terrific (and Hitchcock-shade-of-blonde) genre actress as a traumatized widow on the worst first date of her life. Luckily, that first date is in the soothing, handsome presence of Brandon Sklenar (“It Ends With Us,” another movie about where he comes to the rescue of a woman who’s survived abuse) as a press photographer with baggage of his own.
Running a cool 90 minutes, “Drop” takes place almost entirely in a top-of-the-world kind of high-rise restaurant in Chicago, where Violet (Fahy) is meeting Henry (Sklenar) off a Tinder-like app, and where this appears to be Violet’s first date after surviving a brutally abusive ex. How “Drop” draws a line between the traumas Violet suffered at the hands of the father of her child and those she will by the end of this tightening noose of a movie will rankle some viewers. But Landon and screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach (“Truth or Dare”) are, at the end of the day (or at least this hour and a half of yours), making a film that doesn’t proclaim to make a statement about domestic abuse issues; it just ends up doing so.
Violet is a therapist who’s trying to get back out there into the dating game. She hires her sister Jen (Violett Beane) to not only babysit her son Toby (Jacob Robinson) but also inadvertently supply fashion advice, as Violet has a tendency to wear unflattering clothes that cover her up from top to toe (“I look like I’m playing bingo at a rest home”). Jen sends her out in a red velvet number that’s much more giving toward the imagination, but is the sort of thing that Violet, now used to covering up her emotional scars, is no longer so comfortable wearing. Nor is Violet particularly comfortable in her skin in general, and Fahy radiates sadness — which is then interchanged with desperation as the plot kicks into gear — as a woman who feels ill-fit to be getting back out there to begin with, her confidence stripped down to a wire by an ex who once held her at gunpoint.
In a bit of red-herring foreboding — and in a sequence where there is a whole school of such herring — Henry is late to their dinner date, affording Violet time alone at the bar where she starts receiving threatening drops on her phone. The dorky, ScreenLife-adjacent technology introduced into the movie (which also includes oversized and dramatically embossed text messages emblazoned across the screen that evoke more sophisticated Word Art) is a little narratively clunky and contrived. Why Violet, an abuse victim, makes her identity accessible on a drop-sharing platform that makes the identities of everyone in the restaurant visible makes no sense but is only another reminder that this is only a movie trying in no way to adhere to reality but instead only to bend it for the sake of thrills and chills.
The opening sequence effectively introduces a suite of potential suspects who could be sending threatening drops that eventually direct Violet to the security cameras in her home, where a masked figure with a silenced pistol is standing in the living room. Those suspects include the bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), a sad sack of a man on a blind date (Reed Diamond), an imperious hostess (Sarah McCormack), and an unctuous, boozy piano player (Ed Weeks). Making matters more tense, by the time Violet settles in with Henry (Sklenar) at their table to consider a menu including South African lobster and lemon oyster soup, whoever’s sending said drops is commanding she keep the date going for as long as possible. Meanwhile, she’s having a visible panic attack, especially as the drops start to hint at a more sinister political plot that involves Henry — who works for the Chicago mayor — and a vial of liquid fentanyl that she’s asked to put into his drink.
Even their waiter (a scene-stealingly flamboyant and hilarious Jeffrey Self) seems like he could be in on the conspiracy as Landon and cinematographer Marc Spicer play with lighting and zoom effects to illuminate a patron or server or barkeep’s potential implication in the mystery. Questions like why Henry stays on this date, or how long Violet could possibly get away with stalling for time in the bathroom while bending to the drop sender’s will, stretch the limits of credulity that threaten to overtake “Drop’s” effectiveness at all.
A wildly ridiculous, over-the-top third act pushes “Drop” into cinematic-shootout action movie territory where, at one point, someone is hanging suspended from the side of a building by a tablecloth. “Drop” is much more effective in the sparse moments where, for example, Henry and Violet share intimacies with each other, or where Violet hatches clever ways to get Henry back to (or away from) their table. Landon also has a reverence for small objects and their capacity to foreshadow or narratively flip the story, like a watch, or a bowl of panna cotta, or an RC truck, that Hitchcock would appreciate. “Drop” works best in its nimblest moments, but ultimately we should have nothing but gratitude for a movie that has almost zero bloat and tells an effective, original story in 90 minutes, even if this sleek package is made up of some shopworn tropes.
Grade: B-
“Drop” premiered at SXSW 2025. Universal Pictures releases the film April 11.
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