I have a special place in my heart for a movie that knows what it is, doesn’t mislead and delivers accordingly in a tight 90 minutes. Drop, as indicated by title and trailer, is a one-room thriller for the digital natives: what would happen if your phone was barraged by mysterious AirDropped memes telling you to kill your date, or your family dies? It’s a simple premise familiar to anyone who has received an unwanted dick pic on the subway, and one that writer/director Christopher Landon drills into with fresh and invigorating precision.
And one elevated by two well-cast leads in Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar, who both keep their cards just close enough to their chests. Sklenar, recently in It Ends With Us, once again convincingly plays the nice, understanding guy to a woman who has survived domestic abuse; sweet and self-effacing, he’s more “fuck” or “marry” material than “kill”. But this is Fahy’s movie as Violet, a therapist for survivors of domestic violence and a single mother to a five-year-old son. She is no stranger to it; the film opens with a scene one could assume is a flash forward, with a bloody and bruised Violet crawling limply away from her late husband, who brandishes a loaded gun.
Years later, when enough time, healing and celibacy have passed for her to have no new dinner outfits, Violet finally braces for a first date with a man from the apps. Henry, 32, a photographer, lives in Chicago and looks friendly enough. Until the drops begin, Landon makes smart and natural use of one’s iPhone; Violet swipes through his profile for the pleasure of her sister Jen (Violett Beane), the babysitter and cheerleader for the evening, to show the familiar contrived blend of earnest and goofy. In person at a fancy high-rise restaurant, Henry (Sklenar), is amiable, thoughtful and helpful in attempting to help Violet identify the source of increasingly hostile “DigiDrops” – AirDrops without the copyright infringement – sharing files to her phone in chilling meme-speak from within a 50ft radius.
But once the devil emoji in her phone tells her to check her security cameras, revealing a masked intruder in her home set to kill her son if she fails to poison her date first, Violet is on her own. This is unfortunately rendered as text-on-screen rather than glancing the phone itself – one of the great scourges of modern movies, as it will never not look cheap and silly, and my only ick with this one. But Landon, director of the Happy Death Day movies and, more pertinently to millennials on the dating market, the screenwriter of 2007’s Disturbia, keeps things snappy, scary and unpredictable enough to distract from the corny font.
Drop deftly threads the needle between the absurd – this is an extreme case of main character syndrome proved true, for reasons that don’t really make sense – and the grounded, with some of the most believable flirting attempts that I’ve heard in awhile and the right level of bad waiter comic relief in Jeffery Self. The stomach drop of first date anticipation, waiting for the guy from the phone to walk in the door, turns out to be a similar sensation to the jump-scare of ominous, anonymous messages. Landon gets plenty of mileage from Violet scanning the room for potential culprits, only to see every single person illuminated by the screen in their hand. Every screen a camera and a portal, every message visible and traced, no place to hide.
For the sake of surprise, I will say no more, other than that Violet plays a game known to generations of women: keeping up the facade of being fine for survival. She must charm Henry enough to stay, exude authenticity and explain her increasingly weird behavior while messaging the villain and plotting potential escapes. A lot for any woman to handle, and played with aplomb by Fahy, finally finding a role worthy of her talent for glimpsing unseen depths as displayed on the second season of The White Lotus. That Drop takes a few too ludicrous steps and still mostly sticks the landing is a testament to her command of the character, who is given very little in terms of characterization yet never feels two-dimensional.
Her dialed-in performance is thankfully matched by an overarching crispness to the proceedings – just enough flourishes, an enjoyable but not unbearable amount of stress, no wasted time, a perfect match of star, script and style. For those who sort for lean and limber in their thrillers, Drop is a date worth making.
Drop is screening at the SXSW film festival and is out in cinemas on 11 April
