1 week Ago By Alison Gillmor
You know those public service announcements the theatres run before movies, telling you to turn off your phone? (“Don’t be a Tommy Texter!”) Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * To continue reading, please subscribe: *$1 will be added to your next bill. After your 4 weeks access is complete your rate will increase by $0.00 a X percent off the regular rate.
You know those public service announcements the theatres run before movies, telling you to turn off your phone? (“Don’t be a Tommy Texter!”) Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? You know those public service announcements the theatres run before movies, telling you to turn off your phone? (“Don’t be a Tommy Texter!”) You’ll be glad you listened when you watch this super-compressed tech thriller, which might get you looking sideways at your device and all its intrusive, information-hungry apps. Meghann Fahy (best known for playing Daphne in the second season of ) is Violet, a young widow who is tentatively venturing back into the dating world. Bernard Walsh / Universal Pictures Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar) discover first dates can be deadly.
Leaving her young son Toby (Jacob Robinson) at home with her sister Jen (Violett Beane), Violet is finally going for an in-person meetup with Henry (Brandon Sklenar from ), a man she met on a dating app and has been chatting with for weeks. Violet is a little nervous, but it’s nothing a glass of Malbec can’t help, at least until an AirDrop invite on her phone goes from weird to menacing to potentially murderous. Violet’s anonymous contact tells her that if she tries to leave the restaurant, her son will die.
If she tells Henry what’s happening, her son will die. If she attempts to contact the police, her son will die. The threats are backed up by footage of her house, where she can see a masked intruder.
As Violet tries to track the source of the messages, which are coming from inside the restaurant, director Christopher Landon ) and scripting team Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach ( ) tighten the suspense, deftly combining extreme tech paranoia with the more mundane jitters of an awkward first date. Fahy plays Violet as smart and tough and resourceful, and Sklenar gives a performance of scruffy, self-deprecating charm. The two leads somehow manage to pull off believable chemistry, despite the almost constantly buzzing phone lying between them on the table.
There’s even minor comic relief with the pair’s adorably incompetent, oversharing waiter Matt (Jeffery Self). The restaurant is located high up in a glass-and-steel Chicago skyscraper, and Landon makes the most of its sleek, dark, overdesigned surfaces. In fact, he really seems to be enjoying the movie’s deliberately set limitations as he explores and exploits not just the physical space of the restaurant, but the virtual realm of the average phone with its vast amounts of (supposedly) private digital data.
During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. Almost everyone in the movie is texting, scrolling, sharing and snapping pictures. And then there are the restaurant’s surveillance and security systems, adding more layers to the film’s pervasive sense of technological threat.
Bernard Walsh/Universal Pictures Meghann Fahy There are some drawbacks to the story’s self-contained approach. Violet’s adversary remains unseen and unheard for most of the film’s runtime, represented only as text messages that float on the screen, so we don’t get a developed villain. The conspiracy that sets the whole nightmarish evening in motion is barely sketched in.
Most problematically, domestic abuse is used as a plot device, though overall approaches this theme more responsibly than 2024’s (another movie in which Sklenar plays a sensitive would-be boyfriend). Still, while the premise is a bit silly and the subsequent action a bit implausible, there’s a brisk, unassuming skill in the way Landon handles things. is not ambitious, but it is entertaining and effective, and it might just get you deleting some of your risky apps on the way out of the theatre.
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ca Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism.
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Drop Starring Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar ● Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital ● PG, 95 minutes ★★★1⁄2 out of five The script’s “rules” need to be credible in these things, or we just get twitchy and bored, which is unfortunately the case here. — Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph (U.
K.) It’s a taut little movie, almost totally set in the restaurant, with a just keen enough sense of plausible and preposterous. It knows to keep the pressure-cooker plot moving while not overstaying its welcome.
— Jake Coyle, Associated Press Director Christopher Landon injects the entire affair with so much stylistic verve and narrative propulsion that, like the best kind of first date, it whips by almost too quickly. — Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail It’s a perfectly preposterous setup for a thriller, but the core of Fahy’s agonizingly distracted performance is something real and recognizable. — Alison Willmore, New York Magazine Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian.
She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider .
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support. Advertisement Advertisement.
