SXSW 2025 Film Review: Drop
MEGHANN FAHY CARRIES THE FIRST DATE FROM HELL
As with typical Christopher Landon fare, Drop is by-and-large a lighter version of a movie you’ve already seen with its glaring flaws plastered over by an immensely likable lead. Here, Meghann Fahy navigates a first date that plunges into a paranoid nightmare, terrorized by anonymous drops that threaten her family. With a winnowing bag of tricks and a bottle-episode location that feels more limiting than creative, Drop works as well as it does solely upon Fahy’s winning performance and frantic interiority. Minor spoilers ahead…
If anything, director Christopher Landon has a certain bravery to his oeuvre. Known for putting slasher spins on untouchable genre classics, Landon has reconfigured mainstays such as Groundhog Day and Freaky Friday into popcorn horror movies. The results typically microwave age-old themes into nothing more than vaporware, but are mostly rescued by charismatic leads that elevate the material above thin pastiche: Happy Death Day found a breakout star in Jessica Rothe, and Freaky squeezed every last mile out of both Vince Vaughan and Kathryn Newton. With Drop, Landon’s latest leaves the horror space for a more paranoid flavor, aping single-location thrillers such as Nick of Time, Red Eye, and Phone Booth. And just like its predecessors, Drop finds a bracing lead performance to more than make up for its shortcomings.
Drop is centered around Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widowed mother preparing for her first date with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a patient and handsome photographer she’s been speaking to on a dating app. Her supportive, ball-busting sister Jen (Violett Beane) helps her pick an outfit and babysits her cherubic 5-year-old Toby (Jacob Robinson) as Violet heads the swanky rooftop restaurant Palate, a mahogany atrium that overlooks the Chicago skyline. The result of saved-up mettle bottled for years after her abusive husband almost killed both her and Toby, Violet is already a ball of nerves as Henry runs late. As she downs some liquid courage, she interacts with a whole coterie of colorful characters at the restaurant: there’s friendly bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), a skeezy lothario piano player (Ed Weeks), and the nebbish Richard (Reed Diamond), an over-the-hill divorcee also on a first date.
“Drop works as well as it does solely upon Fahy’s winning performance and frantic interiority.”
It isn’t before long, however, that a mysterious interloper at the restaurant begins dropping ominous messages onto her smartphone via “DigiDrop,” first as vaguely-threatening memes, but then quickly escalating into demands and near-impossible instructions lest a masked gunman - caught on Violet’s online nanny-cam - executes her sister and her son for non-compliance. Much of Drop has Violet juggling her patient-as-a-saint date with increasingly uncomfortable tasks that range from stealing an SD card from Henry’s phone to spiking his drink with poison, all the while trying to uncover the culprit extorting her through the screen. As Violet scrambles to surreptitiously alert anyone to her predicament, Landon and screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach aim clearly to evoke abusive relationships and the systems that silence women, but the gorgeous-yet-hermetic Palate is a double-edged sword: it’s a bottle-episode location that feels more limiting than creative, and there’s so many ways across a 95-minute runtime you can have your heroine wriggle out of impossible situations. The longer Drop goes on, the more questions are raised as well that strain credulity: Does Henry have brain damage to stick around for this long? Why didn’t Violet immediately turn off her AirDrop? Why extort Violet and not a waiter or restaurant staffer?
Drop might barely hold together as a single-location thriller, but it’s Meghann Fahy who puts the entire conceit on her back, plastering over plot holes and repetitiveness with a performance that’s impossible not to root for. Redeploying her masterful interiority from the last season of White Lotus, Fahy weaponizes her eyes and demeanor to convey broiling emotional conflict as her date slips sideways into hell. Sprinkle in some smoldering chemistry with Sklenar, and you’ve got a whole movie star: Whether it’s clever moments of deception, full-on rom-com repartee, or a third act departure into action beats a la Red Eye, it’s Fahy who shines the brightest.
