DROP - Mark Reviews Movies

Drop, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 10, 2025

Drop plays in the vein of a whodunnit, except the crime has yet to happen. We're not asking who committed a murder here. We're left to wonder who is trying to force an innocent woman to kill another person. The setup and puzzle of the plot pretty much remain the same as a murder mystery, as a group of suspects are in a single location and our protagonist has to figure out the identity of the would-be killer-by-proxy.

That's the simple way to explain the narrative of Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach's screenplay, which is complicated and made especially clever by two specific elements. The first, of course, is that there's an added and quite thick layer of tension to this reconfiguration of that classic premise, since lives are very much on the line and our main character is put in the awful position of having to choose between two impossible options: either kill someone or risk her son being killed.

The second element is the film's use of technology. Considering how dependent we have become on smartphones and services that connect us—whether we want to be connected to them or not—to others, it's surprising how few movies really take advantage of the practical and all-encompassing nature of how people use modern tech. This one turns a cellphone and one of its assorted features into the driving forces of the story's threat and plot, and the idea fits so perfectly here that the conceit stops feeling like a gimmick almost immediately.

The basic notion is that Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widowed mother and survivor of domestic abuse, is going on her first date in a few years. She will be meeting a man, whom she has talked to via a dating app for about six months, at a swanky restaurant downtown, located on the 39th floor of a skyscraper.

While she waits for her date, Violet starts receiving anonymous messages on her phone, "dropped" from someone else inside the restaurant directly to her device. She initially thinks they're some kind of prank, but the messages, displayed in big blocks of text in frame like a figure standing over Violet's shoulder, become sinister as soon as she decides to communicate with the sender.

We'll get to those mechanics and their repercussions soon enough, because they do overtake the story as soon as the sender makes a direct threat against Violet's son (played by Jacob Robinson), who's being watched at home by her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane), and orders her to kill someone to save the boy's life. Actually, that's a pretty concise summary of the plot on its own, although there are the important details that Violet knows the anonymous individual is serious, because of her phone's access to security cameras inside her house, and the person the unknown message-sender wants killed is Violet's date Henry (Brandon Sklenar).

There's not much time to establish these central characters and the assorted people in the restaurant, who have all immediately become suspects in Violet's mind. Even so, the screenwriters and director Christopher Landon are quite judicious in making sure we like the main couple—one who knows there is danger and the other completely oblivious to it—and have some reason to worry about a key number of figures in the room with them.

There's the pair's waiter (played by Jeffery Self), for example, who is on his first shift and is either suspiciously too friendly or genuinely trying way too hard to make a good impression. We also meet Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), an attentive and curious bartender, and Phil (Ed Weeks), the pianist who keeps staring at Violet either because he's a bit of a creep or on account of him keeping tabs on her for that other reason.

The messages keep coming. Violet keeps trying to find a way to outsmart the message-sender, but the anonymous person seems to know what she's doing and saying at every moment, even when she tries to keep her phone out of sight or hide in the bathroom. She's a resourceful one, which is a major reason to like her as a protagonist in this kind of story, and we learn just enough about Violet's past, mainly a final confrontation with the dead husband, and how she has used those experiences to help others to sympathize with her beyond the complete mess that this first date turns out to be.

Fahy's performance is far more complex than it might seem, since she has to embody all of these characteristics while also communicating the performance Violet is trying to put on that nothing is wrong, even though everything is. Sklenar is quite good, too, although his role is little more than existing as a genuinely nice guy who would be a fine match for Violet, if not for the fact that someone wants him dead and is going to great lengths to ensure his demise, and, more generally, doesn't in any way deserve to have his life threatened.

Most of this does take place within the confines of the restaurant, and that gives Drop a claustrophobic feeling of paranoia. The limited setting also lets Landon stylistically highlight that atmosphere (such as literal spotlights on suspects as Violet realizes how many viable ones there are), as well as the ways the technology are visualized and exploited to try to solve the central mystery. To be sure, a second climax here abandons the entirety of the film's gimmickry for some standard action, but until that point, it's impressive how far the filmmakers take this core idea and how smartly they play with it.

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