Written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach
Directed by Christopher Landon
Starring Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane and Jeffery Self
USA, 2025
DROP reminded me of HEART EYES, not in a good way, so I was not surprised to see that it shares one chief suspect: Christopher Landon directed this one and wrote the other one. It’s surprising considering I liked a bunch of his other stuff. Maybe he’s jumped the (baby) shark! (Get it? Because that song is in this movie!).
Meghann Fahy stars as a single mother who is tentatively getting back into the dating game after a traumatic experience in which she was forced to kill her husband in self defense. Her dinner date’s in a fancy restaurant at the top of a skyscraper, offering a breathtaking view of the city.
The movie lost me at the premise, which is a terrible sign. Maybe this dates me, but the premise is that everyone in this movie has their phone’s airdrop thing both turned on and set so literally anyone can drop them stuff/see them on the app. I mean I understand maybe like kids do this or something, especially around school where they “know” everyone, but these are adults. Am I an out of touch luddite or is it normal for all adults to default to having their drop thingy totally accessible to all strangers?
So, that required some disbelief it was difficult for me to suspend right from the get-go, and then the movie just got stupider and less believable from there. We’re introduced toe veryone in the restaurant like it’s a disaster movie, so that we can have lots of suspects and wonder who the mysterious stranger is who is sending threatening “drops” to our heroine, the most threatening of which reveals that there is an intruder in her home waiting to off her kid and her sister (who is babysitting) if she doesn’t do the stuff the dropper wants her to do, blah, blah, blah.
First I was annoyed much of the movie takes place on her phone’s screen and, not being in a movie theater, it was too small for me to read the texts from across the room. I thought, how come this movie doesn’t project the texts all big like every other movie these days? Then, the movie started finding creative ways to do that, and I thought, boy that sure looks dumb. So I guess the movie can’t win?
Early on I wanted to be like, “Just call the police,” to which you’d say, “Yeahbut then he’ll kill her kid!” But — spoiler alert — it ends up just coming down to that, anyway. After this tiptoeing around, trying to figure out some sly way out of the situation, writing notes on money with lipstick, trying to write notes with eyeliner… it ends with her just rushing home real fast to try to stop her kid from getting killed. She could have just done that from the get-go, movie!
Also not for nothing but everyone looks the same in this flick. There’s like five different white guys with beards, and one of them is in a “big reveal” at the end that’s not a big reveal at all, but still, had me going, “Uh who is everyone.” Again, maybe I’m old.
Like HEART EYES, this mercifully short movie feels about twice as long as it actually is as there are more and more contrivances, by both the filmmakers and the characters within the movie, to deliberately stretch out the process of having dinner as long as possible. Being bored, my mind wandered to wondering what it’d be like to make a fan edit of the movie where you remove the horror plot and just edit it down so that it is the most awkward and weird first date of all time. I would have liked that movie better.
Still, the movie has a nice set and good cinematography.
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