The drop is coming from inside the restaurant. Atop a high rise towering over Chicago, the drop could be coming from anyone inside, patron or staff. Then they come one after another. Someone wants to play a game and the lives of children hang in the balance.
Christopher Landon has devised a taut, super fun thriller in Drop, which knows exactly what it wants to be and is at home with existing as fun genre fare. The director of the beloved Happy Death Day series, Landon stands tall as a genre filmmaker who understands form and not just how to direct his actors but how to lead an audience.
There is a nimbleness to Drop, which is light on its feet and fast moving, which propels the movie through its high concept. Much of the movie takes place at a table and on phones but there are also well-shot moments of ingenuity, where the camera is adjusted with clever purpose and more formal intrigue.
Meanwhile, Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brendan Skelar) have pitch-perfect chemistry and the movie is built out of their shared experience on a first date. Because so much of the movie takes place on phones, Landon employs clean visualizations of texts and the phone screens, nothing especially gets lost for a lack of context.
To say anything about the plot is to say more than the viewer should know walking into Drop. Come in knowing it’s a well-designed pot boiler of a thriller and is a rigidly designed little toolkit of an audience pleasing movie. Too often, Drop dips into the contemporary mode of traumatic exposition (perhaps it’s become a Blumhouse prerequisite), but when it’s actively in the game of cat and mouse over the cellphone, Drop is exceptionally fun, and stylistically assured.