In the realm of ticking-clock thrillers, there’s often been a fine line between crafty villains applying mounting pressure to an innocent hero and bad guys who appear frustratingly omniscient until it’s time for them to lose – a line that’s been all but obliterated by our tech-enabled self-surveillance state. We’re all theoretically surrounded by video-equipped communication devices, supposed security cameras, facial-recognition software, and probably worse that we don’t know about, which makes wriggling away from an all-seeing gaze feel more like a fantasy than a puzzle. Moreover: What fun is a puzzle that’s predicated on unseen antagonists holding all the pieces?
It’s a challenge for Alfred Hitchcock, but he’s dead; Brian De Palma, but no one will give him money; Jaume Collet-Serra, but he just put out two movies in four months; and so that leads us, finally, to Christopher Landon, the director of Drop, purportedly a limited-location thriller that hinges on anonymous Airdrop-like communications from an unseen interloper, and actually just a movie about a woman texting in a restaurant. And also her trauma, probably.
OK, definitely: We learn that Violet (Meghann Fahy), a single mom and widow, is a survivor of domestic abuse, and just starting to get back out on the dating scene after years of child-raising and recovery. She’s been texting for several months with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a handsome and seemingly patient man who’s happy just to get dinner with her at a fancy restaurant scraping the Chicago skyline. So Violet leaves her five-year-old Toby (Jacob Robinson) with her sister Jen (Violett Beane), puts on a brave face, and goes on a date. She’s nervously enjoying herself, too, until she starts receiving some off-brand, not-precisely-Apple “drops” pestering her, then outright threatening her: Kill your date, or your son dies. Security cameras in her home confirm this isn’t a bluff; there really is a stranger in her house, ready to follow through.
Landon began his career as a screenwriter, and his best movies as a director have that pitch-ready gimmickry down to an art: Happy Death Day is slasher Groundhog Day, its sequel is slasher Back to the Future Part II, and Freaky, well, its working title was Freaky Friday the 13th; well-played, sir. Drop, which Landon didn’t write himself, has been engineered to sound like it’s matching that height of concept, though the structure is a little more rickety; the unseen bad guy reveals early on that he’s “cloned” Violet’s phone (meaning he can track her every text, call, etc.) and so the titular drops amount to… a few weirdly playful memes and a lot of anonymous texting. The AirDrop hook is ultimately more of a limiting factor for the bad guy, who must remain within a certain range of his victim, than any particularly chilling advantage over a regular burner phone. (Burner is admittedly not as catchy a title, nor is Cloned Phone Who Dis.)
The drops do allow the movie to start out as a cleverly paranoid mystery, as Violet keeps scanning the room for the culprit; Henry even joins in at first, before the mystery texter reveals her true marching orders. (Again: Aren’t the initial meme drops only risking exposure?) With great efficiency, the movie introduces suspects – though maybe not enough of them, considering how many people are in the restaurant. From there, the potential omniscience threatens Violet, and the story: Will screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach think up enough possible escape strategies to give Drop the appropriate amount of give and take, or will the bad guy’s “I wouldn’t do that if I were you” texts pile up at an alarming, tedious rate?
More importantly: Have I made this sound like a bad movie? It’s actually largely a blast, not because Landon is as talented as De Palma, or even Collet-Serra, but because he works real hard to make up the difference. Moreso than the bright, montage-heavy, performance-dependent (and, to be clear, delightful) Happy Death Day pictures, he and cinematographer Marc Spicer go all in on visual tricks, with short but elegant room-surveying tracking shots, canted angles, impressionistic lighting effects to spotlight individual characters, and the occasional flips and spins for extra disorientation. This could have come across as sweaty, but it’s assembled with a glee that can’t be faked; the obvious effort becomes part of the fun.
This puts Drop well in the zone of Collet-Serra’s recent (and structurally similar) Carry-On, no small praise for the neo-Hitchcockian exercise. What keeps the new movie from further ascension to De Palma levels of bliss is its inability to push those attempts at virtuosity into a state of feverish cinematic overdrive, where the show-off fakeness somehow becomes more viscerally real. If this were easy, De Palma might not look like such a genius. As-is, Drop has a few brief moments of near-operatic derangement, a couple of flashbacks that experiment with bad-taste exploitation, and one climactic gag with a semi-twisted kick. Mostly, though, it trades in predictable stuff about Violet overcoming her past traumas as she navigates this brand new one.
Landon can flip this into a strength; just as the Happy Death Day movies are disarmingly sweet amidst jokes about gruesome slapstick demises, this movie obviously feels warmly toward Violet and he treats a few side characters here, like a too-much server (Jeffrey Self) on his first-ever shift, with similar affection. Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance. To work so well in the moment is its own perfectly ephemeral achievement.
Director: Christopher Landon Writers: Jillian Jacobs, Chris Roach Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson Release Date: April 11, 2025
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.
