The premise is deceptively simple, but when a mostly two-location thriller with only a handful of characters gets placed into the hands of producers like Jason Blum and Michael Bay, as well as filmmaker Christopher Landon (Freaky, the Happy Death Day movies, We Have a Ghost), you get Drop. The film follows Violet (Meghann Fahy), who is bombarded with text messages from an unknown perpetrator commanding her to kill her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), in the fancy restaurant where these online sweethearts are having their first in-person encounter.
There are many mysteries in Drop, such as who in the restaurant is sending Violet these messages, why does this person want the handsome Henry dead, and where exactly in “Chicago” are they eating, because from the view outside the rooftop dining room and the traffic outside, they aren’t in any building I’ve ever seen.
For the record, the film was shot in New Orleans, but the filmmakers couldn’t even be bothered to pull a few b-roll shots of our lovely skyline to fake a Chicago view at any point during the movie. In fact, the only real Windy City reference that holds up (barely) is that the couple’s waiter claims to be a Second City improv guy who comes with bad jokes and even worse stories.
Let’s start at the beginning: the film opens with Violet getting physically abused by an ex who ends up dying by the end of this most recent encounter, during which he pulls out a gun and threatens to kill both her and their infant son. Yet another mystery is how this man ended up dead. The police initially think that Violent got the gun and shot him, but she says that’s not what happened. When we finally do see how the evening went down, nothing about it seemed worth holding back, nor was it particularly revelatory. That goes for a few moments in this film.
Skipping ahead a couple of years, her son is a bit older, and it’s clear that Violet has spent the time since mainly caring for him (he appears to be a child with special needs), but she’s finally ready to meet Henry for the first time at the aforementioned restaurant after months of courting online. The e-messages start dropping into her phone while she waits at the bar for him. At first, they seem like jokes, but soon they get more aggressive and mildly threatening; they turn outright dangerous when she’s sent video of her home with a gun-wielding intruder in it while her son and her babysitting sister (Violett Beane) are hanging out in another room.
While the setup of the film is pretty solid, once the games begin and Violet has to sneak a poison into Henry’s drink, the logic and my patience with Drop started to fall apart. At first she mentions these digi-drops to Henry, but then she’s instructed that she can’t talk to him about them any longer. Instead, she just acts strange all night and leaves the table several times to deal with the anonymous perpetrator’s demands.
Meanwhile, Henry just sits at their table like a desperate chump waiting for her to return. The one behind the messages has placed hidden cameras all over the restaurant, so there’s nowhere for Violet to hide or have a private conversation. And even when she does figure out who the culprit is, if you have a knowledge of solid character actors in the last 30 years, you’ll know exactly who the most likely guy is and you’ll be right. Yet another non-surprise reveal.
Even the man in her house is masked, implying that his identity is that of someone we’ve met before, but in the big, dramatic moment when he’s unmasked, I was dumbfounded by his identity (as was most of the audience). He is actually someone else in the film who appears for about five seconds, and points to you for giving enough of a shit to realize who he is.
Drop is far from terrible; it’s more aggressively average—an intense beige, if you will. The two leads are both quite good, especially at fighting against a screenplay (from Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach) that is doing them no favors in terms of dialogue or character details that we can learn about them even a smidge. I tend to like Landon’s films (although last year’s We Have a Ghost was terrible), but Drop is not among his best. And unless you’re simply desperate to get your heart racing just a little bit, feel free to skip this and see one of the better films being released this week.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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