Great ideas can strike in the strangest of circumstances. In the case of Drop, it came when Olivia Sui, girlfriend of the film’s executive producer Sam Lerner, received mysterious Shrek memes (of all things) through AirDrop, Apple’s close-proximity file-sharing feature. Swap ogre memes for murder threats and you have director Christopher Landon’s ridiculously fun tech thriller, which stretches its premise to absurd heights befitting of its inspiration.
It starts out innocently enough. Violet (Meghann Fahy) has been out of the dating game for so long that her wardrobe has gone full mum-core. But with the promise of getting Violet’s five-year-old son into bed by 8pm, her sister pushes her to venture out for a first date with photographer Henry (a charming Brandon Sklenar). Over dinner at a fancy high-rise eatery, they flirt despite the nerves — until Violet’s phone buzzes with messages that escalate from weird to deadly.
The handy phone proves to be the ideal setting for a 21st-century paranoid thriller.
The boundaries are clear-cut: these message drops can only be received within a 50-foot radius, which happens to neatly fit within the walls of the restaurant. And so the field is set for a stealth whodunnit (or who-is-doing-it, if you will): could the culprit be the loner with his eyes glued to his phone? Or the rookie waiter who’s a bit too eager for a chat? Landon elevates what could have been a schlocky mystery, deploying theatrical lighting and colour to hone in on potential suspects, fully flexing his camera muscles in the film’s final confrontation.
The predictable end result isn’t quite as gripping as the journey there. At a time where our most private information is vulnerable to a phone-snatch or a single erroneous click of a link, Drop takes full advantage of our trusted tech’s most terrifying capabilities. No matter what Violet tries, or who she seeks help from, she’s caught by the cameras surrounding her and the device in her hand. The once-comforting luxury of the upscale restaurant becomes a gilded surveillance state. And the handy phone proves to be the ideal setting for a 21st-century paranoid thriller.
Fahy may be familiar to most from her ability to destroy you with a single look in the Sicily-set season of The White Lotus, and while Drop isn’t nearly as subtle, her groundedness is the antidote to the film’s silliness. In a survival tactic acquired from her traumatic past, Violet swallows her fear with a polite smile, multi-tasking a promising first date with a covert hunt for an invisible killer. Landon and writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach explore every wild extreme of the film’s digital hell, but it’s Fahy that finds the humanity of it all.
