Drop Review: Competently Executed Claustrophobic Thriller
Directed by Christopher Landon, Meghann Fahy stars as a widow who goes on her first blind date in years. Brandon Sklenar plays the man she meets in a swanky rooftop restaurant. The date is going well until she receives menacing AirDrops on her phone. The messages begin as memes, but they soon turn sinister, asking her to poison her date, as she learns that an assassin is threatening her young son back at home.
Drop has a good and compelling premise. The messages must be coming from someone in the restaurant, so there is an inherent mystery. If there were more than a few suspects, it would have been easier for Drop to extend the premise to a feature-length movie; with only two real suspects, it feels like the mystery overstays its welcome. And there's nothing special that allows the audience to solve the mystery: at a certain point you'll likely realize it's one of two suspects, and it turns out to be this one instead of that one.
As a conventional thriller, Drop works well because of the performances. Fahy is good in the lead role, able to portray both her character's internal conflict as well as a semi-convincing front for her character's date. Sklenar is carving out a nice little niche for himself as the sympathetic guy who comforts domestic violence survivors, the same role he served in It Ends with Us (2024).
Drop includes themes of domestic violence, and the subject is treated sympathetically and empathetically. Some of the dialogue is a bit wonky here and there with a few of the lines better fitting on inspirational posters rather than in the mouths of actors, but Drop is neither exploitative nor deep in its portrayal.
Blumhouse's recent releases, particularly The Woman in the Yard and Ouija, have felt cheap rather than economical, but Drop is a welcome change. It is by no means a flashy or ground-breaking film, and any comparisons to Hitchcock are vastly over-stated, but it is a competently made, intelligently realized, and basically compelling thriller.
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