Our Film and Culture Editor Travis Johnson left this new horror offering still hungry.
Hmm, I don’t know – do two films count as a subgenre? There are older films operating in a similar vein. Wes Craven’s Red Eye, for one, which foregoes the romance but keeps the “trapped in public by a psycho” business”. But Drop comes hot on the heels of Heart Eyes, which was released only a couple months back, a frenemies-to-lovers tale with a horror gimmick. I didn’t think it was much chop, and the same goes for Drop. But I was in the minority on Heart Eyes, and I may be with Drop as well. So it goes.
Drop comes to us from director Christopher Landon, who was one of the three credited writers on Heart Eyes. But just to show I’m no hater, his prior films, The Scouts’ Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, Happy Death Day 2U, and Freaky, were pretty killer bee. This time around he’s working from a script by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, together offering us a nervous first date scenario.
Single mum and telehealth psychologist Violet (Meghann Fahy – The White Lotus) is getting back in the game after what an opening scene heavily implies was a pretty horrific and abusive previous relationship. Hip sister Jen (Violette Beane – The Flash) is babysitting her cute as hell, A Christmas Story-lookin’ son, Toby (Jacob Robinson). Her date is photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar – It Ends with Us), who works for the mayor. He’s nice, and the restaurant they meet at is spectacularly upmarket. Their waiter, Matt (Jeffrey Self – Search Party) is a capital C Character, but what can you do? Things are progressing nicely…
…right up until Violet starts getting anonymous messages on her phone. AirDrops – or “DigiDrops” as the film calls them. At first they’re annoying, then they’re threatening. The big moment comes when Violet is threatened with the death of little Toby unless she offs her date. And off we go.
Drop angles off of surveillance paranoia and technophobia a bit – whoever our mysterious antagonist is, he knows his way around mobile phones and security cameras – but it mainly trucks in social anxiety. We already know Violet is a bit awkward – only Jen’s intervention early on prevents a fashion catastrophe – and the film gets a lot of mileage out of her trying to either track down the Dropper or (probably not, let’s face it) kill amiable, unwitting Henry. It’s frequently played for laughs – this is very much a horror/comedy – but it’s also the main source of tension. This sort of social horror can work well; The Menu, another recent restaurant-set horror hybrid, played the pressures of cultural convention with virtuosity. Here, it’s not enough to carry the whole film.
The cast are solid, mind you, and Fahy convinces and commits to the bit, but this is a pretty light meal. As a mystery, it stumbles simply by not having enough possible suspects in play. You’ll almost certainly clock the most likely early on. The production design is exquisite and Landon, a stylish and bold director, knows how to fill a frame. He also tackles the challenge of making text messages interesting by having them appear in that frame, floating against the background and what have you. But that just reminds me that we haven’t really settled on a visual language for depicting screen interactions in movies and TV. It always remains a gimmick.
Sometimes a very clever gimmick! There’s nothing wrong with gimmicks – they kept William Castle fed and clothed. But Drop isn’t quite clever enough, and doesn’t deploy its conceit effectively enough. It doesn’t stretch it out for too long, though – it’s a tight 95 minutes. But if Drop is your first date pick, then dinner wants to be bloody amazing.
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