It’s always a strange experience when a self-consciously campy horror film pulls out something genuinely emotional, if only for about a minute. Christopher Landon’s Drop is generally content to be exactly what you’d expect from its premise: a movie about the first date from hell, thanks to people constantly checking their smartphones during dinner. Single mom and domestic violence survivor Violet (Meghann Fahy) is at a fancy skyline restaurant with good-looking photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar), but we’re off to the races when she starts receiving threatening memes and texts on her phone from someone who’s taken her son hostage and wants her to do exactly as they say, or else he dies. The perpetrator is clearly at the restaurant thanks to a 50-feet limit on being able to make these kind of airdrops, but who could it be and what’s the goal here?
Largely a one-location film that incorporates giant on-screen text messages as part of the menace, Drop continues the Landon filmography’s specialization in this kind of high-concept horror goofery, but there are worse things for a movie to indulge. There’s some genuine fun to be had in watching Meghann Fahy dart her eyes around and frantically careen between trying to escape her situation and keep the date going with whatever props she has at her disposal. Some of the side characters also get a few good lines, although it’s clear that the gay Landon is mostly interested in Jeffery Self’s flamboyant improv-comedian-turned-waiter, a queeny character in the tradition of Stephen Stucker who vacillates between funny and annoying depending on the quality of the jokes. In other words, most of what’s put to screen isn’t very substantial, but the film at least sustains a nice momentum and does a good job frenetically navigating the space, as Violet is increasingly pressured into targeting a confused Henry for his illicit photographs of a corrupt mayor (amusingly surnamed Adams despite being the Mayor of Chicago).
Violet’s status as a domestic violence survivor who now counsels fellow victims after her abusive husband killed himself in front of her is the one element in Drop that seems truly dark, rather than just possessing the standard hue of horror-comedy darkness. It also inspires the one moment where the film really breaks out some pathos — when the empathetic Henry delivers a surprisingly powerful thesis of a monologue about how abusers just want to twist you around until you can’t recognize normal relationships anymore. It’s a poignant sentiment in a film that seems otherwise content to chuckle, and in the moment, feels like it could be the point where Drop starts to aim higher. Sadly, this actually marks the point where the film begins to fade into genericism. We find out who the culprit is and what his motivations are — they don’t much tie into the domestic violence material at all — and then it’s time for Violet to speed home and save her son. And Landon surrounds this core narrative with a few too many fake-outs wherein the good people being shot or stabbed at what looks like a close range turn out only to have suffered a flesh wound. All of this, plus the fact that Drop is a little too committed to its hyper-contemporary high-tech premise, and its flirtations with something weightier mean that viewers are ultimately left hanging like Henry — wondering whether the vacillations between sincerity and affectation are charming or merely annoying.
DIRECTOR: Christopher Landon; CAST: Meghann Fahy, Brandan Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: April 11; RUNTIME: 222
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