Stream It Or Skip It?

Drop (now streaming on Peacock) is such a neo-Hitchcockian thriller, it feels like it should be an M. Night Shyamalan movie. But it’s directed by Christopher Landon, whose track record includes Freaky and the Happy Death Day movies, here putting The White Lotus star Meghann Fahy through the ringer in an almost-single-setting high-concept thriller. Keep in mind, we never fully bought into the plausibility of some of Hitch’s movies, but they kept us good and clenched up anyway – which is the only thing we can ask of a movie like Drop.

DROP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Violet (Fahy) has been chatting with Henry (Brandon Sklenar) for a few months via a dating app, and it’s time to take this thing IRL. Not that she quite feels ready, though. The wounds are still a little tender from her previous relationship – her husband (Michael Shea), seen in a traumatic flashback, is dead now, and he was an ugly, abusive, violent person. She’s been raising little Toby (Jacob Robinson) on her own for years, and working as a therapist, counseling victims of abuse. It’s been so long since she went on a date, the contents of her closet are munchies for moths. But Henry seems nice, and with a nudge from her sister-slash-Toby’s-babysitter Jen (Violett Beane), Violet is finally hair-up with neckline plunging and confidence summoned – and ready to Get Out There. Finally.

The restaurant is Palate, at the top of a Chicago skyscraper. So, fancy as all heck. Henry texts – he’s running a few minutes late. No big deal. It gives the movie an opportunity to park Violet at the bar for a bit and introduce a variety of ancillary-characters-slash-potential-suspects, among them: a sympathetic bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), the jerkish martini-swilling house pianist (Ed Weeks), an overzealous waiter (Jeffrey Self) and a hapless guy who’s also on a first date (Reed Diamond). She cringes as she watches Hapless Guy blow it, then smiles when Henry at last arrives. She’s not going to blow it.

Well, not if she can help it. The movie hereby establishes “digidrop” as the non-copyrighted movie version of AirDrop, where someone on the same wifi network can send messages or files directly to another person’s smartphone. Two key rules here: It means any stranger on the network can send you memes and junk (hopefully not pics of someone’s junk, if you get my drift), as long as they’re within 50 feet of you. Violet and Henry hit it off quite nicely, but their earnest rapport is routinely interrupted by some idiot digidropping her memes, and she’s not going to just turn the phone off, in case there’s an issue at home with her kid. It’s kind of a jokey thing for a minute, as she and Henry scope out the restaurant for the potential digidrop harasser. Before the digidrops start getting sinister, the real horror begins when Overzealous Waiter tells our adorbs couple, “I’m actually in the improv scene.” RUN AWAY! RUNNNNNN AWWWWAAAYYYYY!

So, real quick here, and without spoiling anything, let’s outline the potentially calamitous scenario: Unwanted digidrops shift from memes to STOP IGNORING MY DROPS to CHECK YOUR SECURITY CAMERAS. Sure enough, there’s a stranger in a ski mask in Violet’s house. If she doesn’t comply with the mysterious harasser’s demands, little Toby gets it. She can’t tell anyone what’s going on, which makes it hard for her to perform specific tasks as dictated to her. And if she deviates from these tasks, the harasser knows, because they’re watching her on the restaurant’s security cams. Is it tense? You bet your tuckus it’s tense. How can Violet play her hand against a stacked deck? How will she wriggle out of this? How will she do it all without alienating this super nice guy – and come to think of it, does he have something to do with this? NO SPOILERS, mein freund.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Between this and Final Destination Bloodlines, the Thriller Playing Out In A Restaurant Many Stories Up sub-sub-sub-subgenre is having a great year. Otherwise Drop mirrors Trap in many ways, from the monosyllabic four-letter-word-that-ends-in-p title to the gripping tension, profligate preposterousness (although nobody out-preposterizes Shyamalan) and the shitshowy ending. 

Performance Worth Watching: Drop might not maintain functionality if Fahy wasn’t holding it all together with a movie-starmaking turn, single-handedly keeping the movie emotionally viable, and preventing it from buckling under the weight of its implausibilities. 

Memorable Dialogue: One-hundred percent decontextualized: “Yahtzee!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Drop drove me cuckoo bananas, and that’s how I knew it was working. Despite its contrivances. Despite its misery-fugue structure, which insists that things can’t get better for Violet before things get worse 200 times. Despite its domestic-abuse subplot, which feels tossed in like an afterthought, a cheap way to manipulate the audience. Screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach try to play us like bagpipes, squeezing our bags until the air escapes us with a desperate nasal bleat. The tension builds and builds, and even when an impossible scenario couldn’t get any more impossible and the bad guys’ attempts to manipulate Violet get silly, it’s fun to see how she reacts – and our feelings mirror that of the villain’s when, late in the movie, he compliments her on how she played her hand. 

Of course, we have to contend with the irony that the crazier we feel, the more we have to admit the film is well-made. And that the abuse bit leads to a bit of fine acting between Fahy and Sklenar. I could reach a bit and insist that Drop’s use of apps and security cams as plot devices stir up enough surveillance-tech paranoia that’ll make you want to fling your phone into an elephant seal’s maw, but you probably want to do that anyway. There’s more horror in the characterization of the tryhard waiter – who we know all too well, don’t we? – who’s both an amplifier of tension and a welcome source of comic relief.

So it remains a mostly surface-level venture where Fahy excels at earning our sympathy, therefore selling the premise, and further strengthens it with her easy, earnest chemistry with Sklenar. The film gets enough comedic and dramatic details right, thus making it a touch easier to swallow its great big absurdities. Of course, if Hollywood has taught us anything, no conflict like this ever gets solved without violence – no group hugs here! – and the climax is a frenzy of preposterounesses, but by then, it’s done enough things well to compensate for its stumbles.

Our Call: Drop isn’t at all a drop-everything-to-watch-it kind of movie, but when you get around to it, it’s not such a bad way to spend 95 minutes. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.