A tight, slightly ridiculous, occasionally stressful movie about a woman trying to survive the worst first date of her life, Drop — the latest from Happy Death Day‘s Christopher Landon — knows exactly how far to push its premise before the whole thing breaks apart. That’s not to say the film doesn’t teeter toward the edge a few times, but it manages to stay upright, mostly thanks to a smart lead performance from Meghann Fahy and a script that (for the most part) actually respects the audience’s intelligence, even when it’s feeding them something this high-concept.
The setup is slick and simple: Violet (Fahy), a widowed mom still recovering from a history of domestic abuse, finally agrees to meet a charming guy named Henry (Brandon Sklenar) after weeks of texting. The date takes place at a swanky, slightly too-perfect Chicago restaurant, and everything seems to be going surprisingly well… until Violet starts receiving mysterious file transfers on her phone via an app called DigiDrop (the film’s stand-in for Apple’s AirDrop). At first, the transfers are just weird, then they get threatening, and suddenly Violet’s informed that her son has been taken hostage and if she doesn’t follow instructions, he’ll die.
From this point, Drop becomes a kind of digital pressure cooker, with Violet forced to carry on her dinner date while secretly navigating a series of escalating commands from an unseen antagonist. She can’t leave, she can’t ask for help, and eventually, she’s told she might need to kill Henry. It’s ludicrous, to be sure, but it’s the kind of ludicrous that works if you buy into the rules early — and Landon, directing from a script by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, does a solid job of laying that groundwork quickly.
Fahy is the biggest reason the film holds together. Much of the film rides on her ability to show what Violet’s thinking without saying a word, and she absolutely nails it. The panic behind the eyes, the calculated attempts to look normal, the subtle shifts in her voice as she tries to keep Henry from catching on — it’s all there. Even when the script wobbles, she still manages to sell it. Sklenar, too, gives a nicely understated performance, threading the needle between “too good to be true” and “genuinely sweet guy caught in a nightmare.”
There are some smart choices sprinkled throughout. For one, Violet actually shows the weird messages to Henry early on, instead of hiding them just to create artificial tension. It’s a little thing, but it signals that this isn’t one of those thrillers where the plot only works because the characters are dumb. The film also makes clever use of its limited setting (the bulk of is plays out in a single location) and finds tension in small things, like whether Violet can excuse herself to the bathroom without raising suspicion, or how long she can keep her phone on the table before it starts to look rude.
Visually, Drop finds ways to keep things interesting despite the limitations of its confined space. There’s a slickness to the cinematography, especially in how it shifts as Violet’s night spirals out of control — warm, inviting lighting gives way to something colder and more sinister. A few directorial flourishes (like the overlay of Violet’s messages on screen) flirt with feeling a bit gimmicky, but they’re mostly used sparingly enough not to distract.
That said, the movie does stumble in a few places. The final act tries to tie Violet’s past trauma into the present-day chaos in a way that feels forced and a little messy. There’s a confrontation late in the film that wants to be emotionally cathartic, but ends up undercutting the tension rather than enhancing it. And while Drop doesn’t completely lose its grip on logic, there are definitely moments where things happen because the plot needs them to, not because they make a whole lot of sense.
It’s also hard not to wish the movie leaned just a bit more into its inherent silliness, but it feels caught somewhere in between: not quite self-aware enough to be campy, not quite grounded enough to be taken fully seriously. Still, as a lean, mid-budget thriller, Drop delivers. It’s entertaining and well-paced, and anchored by performances that elevate the material. Plus, it might make you think twice the next time a random AirDrop request pops up on your phone; as Landon and his cast showcase here, random dick pics may not be the worst thing you can receive from a digital stranger.