1 week Ago
Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar) in “Drop.” Bernard Walsh/Universal Pictures We all have worst first-date stories, but Violet (Meghann Fahy) in “Drop” takes the prize: She’s receiving mysterious phone messages saying that her young son, left at home while she dines out, will die unless she murders the nice man sitting across the table from her. [needle scratch] I suppose you’re wondering how we got here.
“Drop” is no one’s idea of art. It’s just a solid, satisfying escape-room thriller, the room in question being a pricey eatery high atop a Chicago skyscraper and the threat being the unknown someone sending Violet texts and AirDropping her scary images from somewhere in the restaurant, including live security-cam footage of a masked intruder in her house, ready to do the villainous mastermind’s bidding if Violet doesn’t behave. Why her? What does any of this have to do with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), the hunky photographer she’s been online flirting with for months before this first and possibly final IRL meetup? And most important: How many Hitchcock movies does a director have to see before he can mount an acceptable imitation? Because this is, in some ways, “Rear Window” with a nervous single mom in the Jimmy Stewart role and all the other restaurant tables standing in for the apartments across the way.
The movie comes from the Blumhouse horror factory, and the director is Christopher Landon (“Happy Death Day”), but the emphasis is on puzzle-box suspense rather than bloodletting. The rating is a nice, safe PG-13, so other people’s intestines are not on the menu. Instead, the script by screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach papers over a patently ridiculous premise by keeping the action to one location — with stopovers at Violet’s home to bookend the film – and filling the restaurant with interesting character actors playing interesting characters.
There’s the suspicious dude who’s always on his phone (Travis Nelson); the middle-aged couple on THEIR first date (Reed Diamond and Fiona Browne); an empathetic bartender (Gabrielle Ryan, excellent); a snooty hostess (Sarah McCormack); a smarmy piano man (Ed Weeks); an entire table of promgoers; and — the movie’s designated comic relief — Violet and Henry’s waiter, Matt (Jeffery Self), a struggling actor who really wants to tell them about his career in improv. Sklenar, who also played the good guy in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni movie/lawsuit “It Ends With Us,” is effective as Henry — concerned, slightly generic and possessed of infinite patience as his date keeps disappearing to the bathroom to try to call 911 or retrieve a murder weapon from the towel dispenser. But “Drop” is ultimately Fahy’s show as a woman with tragedy in her past and further trauma arriving with the branzino meunière.
The actress, best known as the tech bro’s wife in the second season of “The White Lotus,” uses her piercing blue eyes to suggest panicky resourcefulness beating beneath an exterior of forced calm, and if the role doesn’t call for much beyond that, it fits the limits of an intentionally constrained genre piece. The payoff is a long time coming, but the filmmakers keep the pot of suspense at a slow, steady boil, with occasional closed-circuit cutaways to the heroine’s endangered sister (Violett Beane) and son (Jacob Robinson) at home. (Random trivia note: “Drop” was filmed on sets in Ireland, which probably explains the presence of Robinson, a pint-size Dublin TikTok star with a following in the millions.
He’s certainly not here because he’s a good actor.) (Yes, I know he’s 7. You could swing a cat in Los Angeles and hit 10 child actors with more camera presence, or their agents.
) The finale finally delivers for the action addicts in the audience, with perilous dangling from heights, a high-speed car chase and a bit of knockabout, all of which are in the trailer to fool ticket buyers into thinking the whole movie’s like that. It’s not — it’s trickier. “Drop” is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes.
Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission. Anyway, the film proper has already wrapped up before the drive home, when Violet finally figures out the identity of the tormentor behind the curtain. After that, the only thing left on the menu is just deserts.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com . Three stars.
Rated PG-13. At theaters. Contains strong violent content, suicide, some strong language and sexual references.
100 minutes. Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time. We believe it’s important to offer commenting on certain stories as a benefit to our readers.
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