Drop opens in theaters Friday, April 11. This evaluation relies on a screening on the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.
Usually, probably the most harrowing factor which may occur for those who fail to switch your AirDrop settings is a bunch of youngsters sending you random dick pics – a situation that’s tweaked within the new Christopher Landon-directed techno-thriller Drop. Landon, who additionally made Happy Death Day and Freaky, loves a gimmick. And “What if cellphone, however scary?” positive looks like one. Fortunately, Drop is extra involved in thrilling the viewers than winking at us, and is a extra entertaining movie because of this.
Drop makes harassment-by-Bluetooth scary by pivoting away from the prankster angle early on. At first, Violet (Meghann Fahy) is irritated when somebody begins sending her random memes as she waits for her date to reach at a swanky restaurant on the thirty eighth flooring of a Chicago skyscraper. Then the messages begin getting extra personalised, and Violet realizes that whoever is concentrating on her – she’s unsure who, nevertheless it needs to be somebody inside 50 toes, given their weapon of alternative – is watching her, setting a locked-room thriller plot into movement.
The apparent query right here is, “Why does not she simply change off her cellphone and go away?” And that’s the place the child in peril is available in. Violet is a single mom, widowed in an incident that’s teased within the film’s chilly open however whose traumatizing particulars aren’t revealed till the very finish. Violet has spent many of the 5 years since holed up at residence together with her son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), who was a child when his dad died and is now a precocious child with glasses and intense separation anxiousness. When she pushes again, Violet’s thriller contact begins threatening Toby, and Drop is simply imply sufficient that we will’t make sure that the little man will make it out of this alive.
Violet isn’t dealing with her first time away from Toby since his infancy very effectively both, compounding her jitters about assembly Henry (Brandon Sklenar), the good-looking photographer she’s been messaging on a courting app for the previous three months. Henry is affected person and understanding, and genuinely involved in constructing a relationship; with out revealing an excessive amount of, it’s impossible that he’s the one scary Violet. And in a film panorama choked with well-meaning however hacky takedowns of monstrous males hiding behind pleasant façades, it’s form of refreshing to have a film the place the good man is definitely, effectively, good.
Drop’s tight construction and compounding twists are paying homage to M. Night Shyamalan, with the key distinction being that Shyamalan would by no means get as snarky as Landon does within the first act. Search Party’s Jeffery Self carries a lot of the comedic burden as an oversharing, eager-to-please waiter, who loses endurance with Violet’s more and more weird requests however has to maintain smiling and accommodating her. (This is a really costly restaurant.) There are some sick giggles available afterward, considered one of them an R-rated Spielberg bit involving Toby, a loaded handgun, and a distant managed automobile. But for probably the most half, Drop abandons the wisecracks as soon as the stakes attain life-or-death heights.
Not each a part of this extra earnest method works: Even when it’s not a-joke-a-minute, a Christopher Landon film might be not the place to be exploring themes of home abuse. But the basics of motion, stress, and escalating suspense are robust, and Landon makes nice use of the claustrophobic central location and its vertigo-inducing heights. This unpretentious thrill experience is a enjoyable diversion, and a surprisingly good date film – offering your date isn’t too triggered by a lounge-piano rendition of “Baby Shark.” Parenthood is tough, y’all.
