Ignore
Director Christopher landon may want to go back to horror if he’s hoping for a high concept hat trick.
Drop
Director: Christopher Landon • Writers: Jillian Jacobs, Chris Roach
Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Reed Diamond, Violett Beane
USA • 1hr 36mins
Opens Hong Kong April 10 • IIA
Grade: C
I cannot lie. I love me a high concept, entirely preposterous thriller based on some nugget from the zeitgeist that we all obsess over on some level. The kind of movie that’s predicated on fundamentally boneheaded behaviour – even by the evolving standards of social niceties. Movies that pretend “silent mode” doesn’t exist on phones and that it isn’t actively used. We forgive these niggling details for the sake of narrative momentum and a good time, and that’s okay. But for every bonkers Freaky or anxiety-inspired M3GAN there’s a clunker like Imaginary – or Drop.
Christopher Landon’s latest pivots on the omnipresence of apps (and our blind willingness to download them), the stress of modern dating and most of all, the file sharing AirDrop™®© (I don’t want Apple coming for me) – which is probably the tool here because Drop is a better title than Droid. This isn’t Landon’s first rodeo, having pretty much crushed it in Freaky and the out-of-nowhere high concept surprise Happy Death Day. The problem here is the hokey and/or sloppy writing from Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, who between them penned dreck like Fantasy Island and the should-have-been-better Truth or Dare; Roach cut his teeth on silliness writing for WWE. Landon is working less with the supernatural as he did in his earlier films, this time around the focus being on the insidiousness of everyday tech even as it ultimately saves lives. Most of Drop is in the trailer, and any TV veteran will clock the villain in about 12.7 seconds. The Blumhouse brand has done much better.
Buried somewhere deep in Drop is a truly compelling tech thriller that flirts with what lore says writer Margaret Atwood once dubbed the “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them” phenomenon, which Jacobs and Roach have zero interest in excavating. Fine. But they don’t fill the gap with anything else. As we find out in the prologue, single mom Violet (Meghann Fahy, The White Lotus season 2) is a survivor and domestic abuse counsellor in Chicago who, after several years holed up in her home with her son Toby (who demonstrates psychopath tendencies late in the film), is venturing out into the dating world again. She’s encouraged by her sister Jen (Violett Beane, The Flash), who reminds her that not all men are Blake, her ex-husband and that her dating app dude seems like a good guy. She gets dressed up and goes to one of those 100-storey restaurants and waits for her date Henry (Brandon Sklenar, the other dude in It Ends With Us), an official government (?) photographer or some such. He’s late, she’s panicking and so starts chatting with other people while waiting at the bar. One is the ultra-observant and pro-active bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan). Another is a middle-aged nerd on a blind date, Richard (Reed Diamond, Agents of SHIELD, 13 Reasons Why). Then there’s a skeevy piano player (Ed Weeks) and an arrogant tech bro (is there another kind?). Henry finally shows up and if you’ve seen the trailer you know Violet starts getting drops demanding she fuck him up but good. What would be better is drops demanding she fuck up Matt the Waiter (Jeffery Self), who is screamingly unfunny.
Drop’s biggest sin is its inability to embrace its lunacy enough to make you forget how lunatic it really is, and as soon as that happens Drop – and movies like it – falls apart. Admittedly I seem to be in the minority here; consensus appears to be that this is goofy, tense fun. It is not. The overly-convoluted conspiracy that drives the story breaks your brain the more you think about it and, even more egregious, gets boring fast. This takes place in Chicago where we’re told it’s super easy to do crime; Henry brings his camera to dinner because it will get pinched if he leaves it in the car. If that’s the case why the murder plotting? Why do we have to be in a “fine dining” establishment that clearly really isn’t. What kind of high-end restaurant has a paper towel dispenser in the restroom? The shitty kind – the same shitty kind where you get your own drinks from the bar (!) and management lets Matt the Waiter carry on like he does. There is absolutley nothing wrong with eateries like that, but the point is when you start nitpicking on restaurant business models mid-movie you’ve got trouble. Why bother making that a thing when the location does nothing for the plot? Drop isn’t helped by the fact that Violet and Henry are bland AF no matter how hard Fahy and Sklenar try – she was beaten before, he’s nice – pedestrian filmmaking and, above all, the conceit that, in 2025, a single woman is going to accept aggressive, anonymous messages on her phone. Bonkers high concept is fun but it only works when the seed of the concept is grounded in reality.