Review: Drop (2025)

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It might not quite be an Alfred Hitchcock film for the smartphone era, but Christopher Landon’s Drop does entertain as an outlandish, restrained-setting thriller with more than a whiff of the Hitch to its machinations. Part of its effectiveness and my comparisons to Hitchcock have to do with the heightened scenario, in which an ordinary person is forced to make life and death decisions against a ticking clock. Part of it is the setup and pacing, in which we quickly meet the various suspects, understand their reasons for being there, and then watch the plot develop at a rapid pace as these various characters are pulled into the scenario. But most importantly, it’s that Drop is comfortable with being a movie, first and foremost. It has no interest in appeasing “the plausibles,” those individuals who Hitchcock famously derided for overvaluing the logic of a film over its effect. Drop is about entertainment, not real world logic, and is all the more fun for it.

In Drop, single mother Violet (Meghann Fahy, best known from The White Lotus season two) is on a date with the handsome Henry (Brandon Sklenar) at a fancy Chicago restaurant. Violet was already hesitant to go on the date in the first place, as she hasn’t been on one since the death of her abusive ex-husband, and she’s loath to part from her young son, Toby, even for a minute. But things get considerably worse when, upon arriving at the restaurant, she starts receiving airdrops on her smartphone threatening her to help kill her date lest her son get killed back home.

Violet is in a worst-case-scenario here and the pleasure of watching Drop is seeing her squirm and react to the increasingly insane scenario while also trying to figure out who is behind it all. We see her put on a brave face for Henry, lie her way through one date blunder after another, and waffle on how far she’ll go to rescue her son. There are moments that strain credulity—a request to change tables followed by a ludicrous U-turn raises so many red flags that Henry would have to be nuts to ignore them. As well, Henry is written as something of a blank slate and overly understanding in a repetitive manner. However, it’s fun to watch the narrative progression, which escalates from teasing to taunting to attempted murder in short order.

Much of the film’s success is due to Meghann Fahy in the lead. She’s winning, earnest, anxious in a relatable manner, but refuses to layer her performance with tics to try to make her more “realistic.” She’s motivated by a traumatic past like so many contemporary protagonists, but doesn’t wallow in it visibly on screen. She plays Violet as a likeable, relatable movie heroine, not a real world victim, and her approach strikes exactly the right tone for a film like Drop.

It helps that Violet is written with a blunt clarity that many movie characters lack these days. For instance, in the opening moments we see the final confrontation with her ex-husband and learn that she was never able to stand up to his abuse and manipulations, even to the final moment. Her backstory perfectly aligns with her current situation, so rising to the occasion also gives her the ability to overcome her hardships and leave her emotional baggage behind. This approach is screenwriting 101, straight out of Robert McKee and Save the Cat, so it’s not complex, by any means, but when so many movies nowadays blunder and confuse character motivations, it’s refreshing to get a character that simply makes sense on screen.

Like D. J. Caruso’s Disturbia or Jaume Collet-Serra's Unknown before them, Drop is in a long tradition of second-tier Hitchcock riffs that are entertaining in their unabashed imitation. In this case, the film is something of a twist between The Man Who Knew Too Much and Strangers on a Train, where we get our protagonist uncovering a conspiracy to murder in the midst of a confined setting. 

Also like these past movies, Drop looks like a movie. It’s not draped in shadows. It’s not filmed with narrow focus and mundane visual approaches masquerading behind subjectivity. Rather, it’s brightly lit, crisply edited, a bit glossy and unreal, just like its scenario.

From its lighting to its acting to its plotting, Drop feels like a movie and is all the better for it. It’s classic B-cinema: outlandish, unrealistic, entertaining.

7 out of 10

Drop (2025, USA)

Directed by Christopher Landon; written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach; starring Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Reed Diamond, Gabrielle Ryan, Jeffery Self, Ed Weeks.

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