“It’s just a date,” Violet says, near the beginning of Drop. But it doesn’t turn out to be just any date.
Played by Meghann Fahy, Violet is a therapist who works with abuse survivors, having a tragic past of the same sort, and a young special needs son. She’s trying to get back into dating, so while her lippy sister (Violett Beane) babysits the son, she dresses up and goes to meet Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a hunky photographer she’s connected with online, at a restaurant at the top of a downtown Chicago high rise.
Soon after she arrives at the upscale place, she starts receiving terrifying “drops” on her phone, demanding that she commit a horrible crime, or her son will be murdered. She’s forbidden to leave the restaurant or to breathe a word of her plight to anyone, least of all her date.
Directed by Christopher Landon of the cheeky Happy Death Day and Freaky, this thriller has a classically old school, Hitchcock/DePalma flavor, from its lush score by Bear McCreary to its full-on main title sequence worthy of Saul Bass to its authentic Hitchcock blonde heroine. The script, by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, somewhat recalls Wes Craven’s snappy 2005 thriller Red Eye. Like that film, it’s full of implausibility; there’s hardly a plot point that doesn’t require a more arduous suspension of disbelief than usual, and some of them get still more dubious when you think them over later.
But it’s highly entertaining while you’re watching it. Some of this has to do with Landon’s playful directorial panache as he splashes the “drops” from Violet’s phone onscreen around her head like ominous clouds. But much of it has to do with the strong acting, not just by the leads but by Gabrielle Ryan Spring as a sympathetic bartender, Jeffery Self as an obnoxious, trying-too-hard waiter, and Reed Diamond as a sad sack on a bad blind date, among others.
The coercion of the villains requires poor Violet to act like an addled maniac, so that beautiful as she is, Henry nonetheless seems like a saint for putting up with her. At times I almost felt more tension for how badly her date was going than for the peril and the moral pickle that she found herself in. Drop makes a compelling case for turning your freaking phone off when you go out to dinner.
