Drop (2025)
Director Christopher Landon had a sleeper hit with Happy Death Day, a fun comic horror thriller set in New Orleans. Hopefully, audiences have a similar response to his Hitchcockian thriller Drop, which recently opened the Overlook Film Festival at the Prytania Uptown.
Meghann Fahy (season 2 of The White Lotus) plays Violet, a widowed domestic abuse survivor with a young son. She leaves him with her sister (Violett Beane) as she goes to a fancy high-rise restaurant for a first date with a new suitor (Brandon Sklenar of It Ends With Us). Shortly after arriving, she starts receiving menacing drops on her phone from an unknown person who threatens to harm her son. She knows the perpetrator has to be in the crowded restaurant with her and soon she realizes she must discover their identity without letting her date know what she's up to.
The script by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach is clever. A lot of what Violet attempts makes sense for a woman in her situation. The film also has a good sense of humor, much like Landon's earlier Happy Death Day did. Even though most of the film is set in a single location, Landon finds a way to give some visual pizzazz to the proceedings that might have gotten monotonous to look at in lesser hands. Fahy and Sklenar make for an easy-to-root-for leading couple. Jeffery Self also gets laughs as an overeager waiter.
The film does veer a little into preposterousness at times in the third act, but the finale is still good fun because the viewers are invested in the characters at that point.
Drop is a solid outing for any viewer interested in original thrillers.
