The setting for most of Christopher Landon’s clever thriller Drop is a fancy restaurant in downtown Chicago called Palate. Enclosed in glass walls, it lives on the top floor of a colossal building, with vertiginous views that look down on the city’s other skyscrapers. Its curvaceous interior is full of rounded corners, and the experience following the maître d’ down the ribbed hallway into the dining area feels like entering a warm cocoon. Not since 2022’s The Menu has this much carnage been brought upon a culinary space of such Michelin-ready elegance.
Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a photographer, reserved the restaurant’s most primo table for his first date with Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widowed single mother. It’s a momentous occasion, being Violet’s only such encounter in the years since the violent death of her abusive husband Blake, and following three months of phone correspondence with Henry. Violet’s son Toby is at home with Violet’s younger sister Jen (Violett Beane), a rare occasion. But for both mother and child, separation anxiety will be the least of their worries.
Violet’s nightmare scenario starts with a ping on her smartphone: A nearby user named “Let’s Play” sends her the first in a series of “digi-drops,” using recycled memes from the troll-y internet argot of 4chan. The missives are easy to ignore, at first, until the user alerts Violet to check the surveillance cameras in her home, revealing the presence of a masked invader with a silencer. Violet must follow the instructions of “Let’s Play” to the letter without revealing their presence — informing Henry, the restaurant or the police are obviously verboten — if she hopes to see Toby and Jen alive. Because the villain has apparently commandeered the restaurant’s cameras and can hear her every word, Violet is forced to seek help in silent, analog ways, through stealth messages in lipstick and eyeliner.
It’s a devilish premise, much aided by the claustrophobic nature of the setting. Digi-drops, we’re told, can only be sent from a phone that’s 50 feet from the recipient, meaning within the walls of the restaurant. And so Violet’s job is threefold: She must keep up the pretense of a normal first date while obeying the e-terrorist’s orders (which directly involve Henry), all the while furtively surveying a fraught atmosphere in which everyone is on their phone, and therefore everyone is a suspect. Could it be the pushy piano player, in between tickling the ivories? The single guy in throng to his phone, whom Violet cannot stop bumping into? The flamboyant server, who’s studying improv at Second City when not waiting tables? (Drop takes great pains to remind viewers the movie was set in Chicago, when it was, in fact, shot in Ireland, owing to tax rebates.)
Or perhaps it’s the older man Violet met at the bar, who’s embarking on a blind date? “Mysteries are hard to come by these days,” he says. Watching this gripping, experiential film is a bit like playing a game of Clue, only before the murder happens. Could it be the lady in pink or the tech bro? Will the weapon be a steak knife at the bar or a vial of arsenic in the bathroom?
Drop is very much a 21st-century thriller, exploiting the myriad vulnerabilities of our perpetually connected world while transforming a ubiquitous modern annoyance — the date partner who just can’t seem to get off their phone — into a matter of life and death. But its storytelling owes more than a passing debt to Alfred Hitchcock, whose shadow weighs heavily on Landon’s direction. Like Rear Window, Drop’s mysteries are predicated on colorful ancillary characters visible through the protagonist’s gaze. As in Saboteur and Vertigo, dizzying heights and potentially fatal falls factor into the movie’s firmament, enforcing the double entendre of the title. Meghann Fahy is just the sort of dynamic blonde — a helpless faun on the surface, a resourceful savior underneath — that would have driven Hitch wild. And we know how much Hitchcock appreciated tight, unchanging settings.
Which is why, when Drop abandons its real-time structure and unshackles Violet from the hermetically sealed environment of the restaurant, the movie loses its way. The bare-knuckle tension eases, and improbabilities mount. But Drop is hardly the first or last inventive film to fail to stick the landing. In straddling the border between vintage suspenser and modern techno-thriller, it has its $20 panna cotta and eats it, too.
DROP. Director: Christopher Landon; Cast: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Reed Diamond; Distributor: Universal; Rated PG-13; Opens Friday, April 11 at most area theaters