Hanging on the telephone: Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar in Drop.
Hanging on the telephone: Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar in Drop.
Drop, directed by Christopher Landon, is out now.
Rating out of five: ★★★
If there were such a thing, Drop would make a perfect addition to the “What would you do?” genre of films that throw an unsuspecting protagonist into a perilous situation.
This was certainly my own thinkingas I watched Drop’s heroine, Violet, played by Meghann Fahy (White Lotus season two), who is a single mum dipping her toes into the dating scene five years after the end of an abusive relationship.
In this occasionally nail-biting one-location story, she arrives at a fancy Chicago rooftop restaurant to meet handsome good guy Henry (Brandon Sklenar, who also played the handsome good guy in domestic abuse drama It Ends With Us).
Lucky that Violet has her phone on the table in case of a babysitting emergency, because she’s suddenly inundated with threatening messages “dropped” to her phone by a mysterious sender. Lucky also for the luddites in the audience – Henry explains that to be the recipient of an airdropped text, the sender must be within a small radius, which means the sender is someone in the restaurant. Cue a game of cat and mouse where the not-very-mousy Violet attempts to outsmart and stop her unknown tormentor before they kill her son.
You don’t have to be young and tech-savvy to enjoy the movie, but it probably pays to like a good whodunnit where suspects are despatched while the heroine bungles various efforts to stop more harm.
It’s clever to a point, but thanks to Fahy’s charisma and a suitably ambiguous performance by Sklenar, you are at least kept intrigued until the end. Amid the tension, light relief is provided by Jeffery Self’s waiter, Matt, an over-ebullient improv actor working his first shift at the swish eatery. Director Landon (Happy Death Day) orchestrates a couple of cool set-pieces in the leadup to a ludicrous finale, but perhaps the biggest horror for older viewers will be discovering just how easy it is for strangers to inveigle their way into your phone.
