The poster for Christopher Landon’s “Drop” features star Meghann Fahy’s eyes peering over the top of a mobile phone. This image conveys everything you need to know about “Drop,” a techno-thriller about a first date sent off the rails by a series of threatening airdrops, but it also nods to the most important cinematic tool in Landon’s kit. In this one-setting genre piece, Fahy’s character Violet spends most of her time scanning a restaurant trying to identify who could be tormenting her. Her big blue eyes are searching, concerned, tremulous and tearful. She weeps beautifully, a crucial aspect of this performance.
The eyes have it because Landon spends so much of “Drop” in close-up on his star, keeping her emotional journey front and center, while strapping the audience into a front-row seat for this panicky situation. Fahy, who has been a plucky young journalist in “The Bold Type,” a knowing friend in “The White Lotus” and a tragic party girl in “The Perfect Couple,” plays Violet, a young widowed mother on her first date in a long time. A survivor of intimate partner violence and the mother to Toby (Jacob Robinson), she’s nervous for her dinner with handsome photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar) at an upscale restaurant on the top floor of a high-rise building. But her jitters are eclipsed by the uneasiness, anxiety and terror she experiences when she starts receiving unsolicited messages via an app called DigiDrop.
The messages move from memes to demands, coupled with threats against her son and sister (Violett Beane). Watching a masked gunman enter her home on her security camera app, Violet is pressured to comply with an order to poison Henry, who happens to work for the city mayor. Doesn’t this anonymous intruder know how hard it is to find a good man like him on these dating apps?
“Drop,” written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, is a little bit like a Lifetime movie version of “Michael Clayton,” though it is elevated by Landon’s sense of style. The genre auteur has excelled with cutesy horror movie concepts like “Happy Death Day” (slasher “Groundhog Day”) and “Freaky” (slasher “Freaky Friday”), and while “Drop” is less horror, more thriller (though he doesn’t pull any punches during some shockingly violent fight scenes), the limited setting allows Landon to experiment in his cinematic storytelling.
He alternates between longer takes that survey and set the scene in the restaurant, establishing the circular space and the characters within in it: a chatty server (Jeffery Self), a kind bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), a lecherous piano player (Ed Weeks), a bro on his phone who keeps bumping into Violet (Travis Nelson), a nervous older man on a blind date himself (Reed Diamond). In retrospect, you’ll see how Landon subtly nods to the identity of Violet’s tormenter through editing and cinematography, using a kind of abrasive, choppy cutting style, the character invading the space like an intrusive airdrop.
This odd editing style by Ben Baudhuin works in tandem with the beauty of the cinematography by Marc Spicer. Shot-reverse shot sequences are somewhat abrupt, the characters segregated in their individual frames, Spicer using different angles on close-ups to lend to that jagged sense of separation. The resistance to fluidity creates a sense of claustrophobia and tension; we are locked inside Violet’s panic and fear with her, as she feels increasingly isolated and alone, disconnected from her date and anyone who might help her. The text messages blaze across the screen, occupying all of her brain space (and our visual field), the constant vibration of her phone becoming not just an irritant but the sound of a monster getting closer and closer.
Landon’s intense focus on Violet requires a Herculean facial performance from Fahy, and part of what makes it so great is watching the way this woman immediately slips into a pattern of masking and accommodating, a survival skill from her abusive past. So it is deeply satisfying when Violet makes the switch from passive to aggressive, when she stops merely surviving and starts fighting back.
It’s Landon’s visual style and Fahy’s deeply empathetic performance that makes “Drop” so much more than just a silly high-concept woman-in-peril movie of the week. While the material alone could have been basic, what Landon makes of it with such stylish and emotional execution is anything but.
‘Drop’
3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violent content, suicide, some strong language and sexual references)
Running time: 1:40
How to watch: In theaters on Friday, April 11
Related Articles
Movie review: ‘The Amateur’ looks the part but can’t execute mission
Eagan native Eva Erickson joins an alliance of muscle on ‘Survivor’
Review: Naomi Watts and a Great Dane mourn Bill Murray in ‘The Friend’
Val Kilmer, ‘Top Gun’ and Batman star with an intense approach, dies at 65
KSTP-Channel 5 sports director Joe Schmit to retire at end of April
Leave a Reply