Cyber Bullying Thriller Never Rises Past Its Premise
DIRECTOR: CHRISTOPHER LANDON/2025
If this review sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Aretha Franklin’s review of Taylor Swift: “Great gowns, beautiful gowns.”
Drop kicks off with a great premise. Violet (Meghann Fahy) is heading out on her first date since leaving an abusive relationship, but soon after arriving at the high-rise restaurant, her attention is pulled from the panoramic views and her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Someone in the restaurant is dropping threatening messages on her phone, demanding she complete a series of tasks. The final one is a doozy: Poison Henry or watch her toddler son be murdered.
Drop does get credit for making a film set mostly in one location look good. Instead of a gown, Fahy rocks a great jumpsuit with a beautiful updo, and the production designers created a chic locale both believable as a buzzy Chicago restaurant and a backdrop worth photographing from every angle. It also deserves credit for not forcing us to stare at Violet’s phone for an entire film, instead finding creative ways to superimpose her texts onto the set. Unlike Taylor Swift, however, this script pays little attention to its storytelling.
Once the premise has been established, the movie, well, drops any attempt at innovation. Though this is a production from hit factory Blumhouse and veteran horror writer/director Christopher Landon, the plot moves too slowly to be suspenseful, taking its time with Violet’s every attempt to escape her tormentor. Even at only a 100-minute runtime, it feels like it’s stretching to fill the space, adding buzz after buzz on her phone, finding yet another excuse for her or Henry to leave the table, or pausing for one more flashback to her trauma. (At least Jeffery Self provides some comic relief as an awkward first-time waiter.) When the cyber bully is revealed, it hardly feels like a twist because the logic behind it collapses with just a few questions.
Not that a thriller like this needs an Agatha Christie-style twist, though it wouldn’t have been out of left field given its tepid commitment to reality. (A single mom can afford a Nancy Meyers-inspired home in Chicago on an online therapist’s salary? And this home with a lawn and driveway sits only a five-minute drive from the heart of downtown?) The plot structure in Drop is not so different last year’s Trap, which followed a serial killer trying to escape from an arena surrounded by police. That film also stayed mostly one location, and the Twist Master himself M. Night Shyamalan kept the energy up without the kind of final moment reveal he’s known for. Besides, the fun in an Agatha Christie story isn’t the reveal—it’s in the method of deduction along the way. Because the poster teases “Everyone’s a suspect,” I found myself wishing Violet would probe potential suspects with more depth instead of roaming the restaurant staring at her phone, which doesn’t provide Fahy the same performance opportunities Josh Hartnett found in Trap.
Though Sklenar (after last summer’s It Ends With Us, now showing a penchant for films set in restaurants exploring domestic abuse opposite a woman with a floral name) does his best to make us believe Henry is the most patient man in the world, it doesn’t make up for his lack of chemistry with Fahy. Yes, first dates are awkward, but did our leads meet before the cameras started rolling? Their energies are so mismatched it seems doubtful Violet and Henry even swiped on each other’s pictures. This isn’t just a first date gone wrong—it’s just a terrible date, which means Drop works neither as a thriller nor as a romance. Hey, at least they’ll always have those great gowns, those beautiful gowns.