Review by Jeremy Elwood
When the title card for Blumhouse Productions appears in a trailer or before a movie, you may, rightly or otherwise, feel that you have an idea of what kind of film it’s attached to. Best known for successful, lower-budget horror franchises including Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Insidious, the company also produced Oscar contenders BlackKkKlansmanand Whiplash. Somewhere in the middle, they’ve added some genuinely smart horror/thrillers including Get Out and M3GAN – and this Easter you can add Drop to that category.
Drop is a date movie, both onscreen and off. The trailer gives away more of the plot than I want to, so watch that if you must, but the basics are this – Violet (Meghann Fahy), a trauma and abuse therapist with her own awful experience to draw upon, is finally going on a date with photographer Henry (Brendon Sklenar). However, a mysterious stranger isn’t going to sit back and let first-date jitters be the most nerve-wracking part of their night.
That’s really all you need to know, apart from the fact that the “drop” of the title refers to unsolicited messages and images sent to a stranger’s phone via an app, a social nuisance that is apparently not uncommon in the US, at least as evidenced from the lack of surprise shown by our lead characters when it happens here.
So far, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was just an update on “the phone call is coming from inside the house” horror setup both parodied and revitalised in the original Scream, and comparisons to that horror classic aren’t unwarranted. Like Wes Craven’s homage to, well, himself, Drop strikes a terrific balance between not taking itself too seriously, but playing things straight. At times it’s very funny – Jeffrey Self as an over-confident, first-shift waiter, and Ed Weeks as a lounge piano player, land just on the right side of caricature – yet it also manages to have several surprisingly tender moments. Violet and Henry are adults, rather than the precocious teenagers who usually overpopulate any story where technology is used as a weapon. Fahy and Sklenar are both excellent, and the scenes where they attempt to make their date work despite the growing tension are touching, and played deftly. They have all-too believable pasts, anxieties and vulnerabilities that justify the jeopardy they find themselves in, even as the plot becomes more convoluted and the film itself more stylised. Their choices make sense; every time I felt the movie was about to offer up one of those “why the hell would they go in there, alone?” tropes that so many do, the answer would be satisfyingly revealed.
Director Christopher Landon is known for Happy Death Day and its sequel, but Drop falls far more cleanly into the genre of psychological thriller, rather than outright horror. Thankfully, technology isn’t overused as a plot device – but it is, a little, in the visuals. A few of the fades and graphics feel clunky, particularly compared with a terrific, and classic, establishing shot of the primary location, and some masterfully kinetic camerawork over the action-packed last act.
Drop is a smart, confident thriller that aims for, and achieves, fun over fear. Take a date. It can’t possibly work out worse than the one you’ll be watching.
Drop is released in New Zealand on 17th April, 2025.