Drop (2025) * * *

 

Directed by: Christopher Landon

Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Reed Diamond, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson

Drop is ninety minutes of suspense with a bonkers plot that keeps you on edge nonetheless.  It mostly takes place in a high-rise restaurant overlooking Chicago.  Its principal players are Violet (Fahy), a psychologist who survived an abusive relationship with her son Toby's father, and Henry (Sklenar), who works for the mayor's office.  They met on a dating website and chatted for months before taking the plunge on this fateful first date.  

The high-end restaurant looks beautiful and all seems to be right until Violet receives "drops" from an app which appear to be spam at first, but then they take on a sinister tone.  We learn the drops can only be sent within a finite parameter of fifty feet or less, so they must be coming from someone in the restaurant.  Who is not known, but the why is made evident when the person sending the drops demands Violet poison Henry or else her son will be killed by a masked intruder at her home.  As is customary with such a plot, Violet is being watched at every turn, and each attempt she makes to get help is met with ramifications and chidings from the sender.   Oh, and of course, she can't tell anyone.

Drop runs at a taut pace with Violet (and us) trying to decipher who is pulling the strings and why he or she wants the ever-patient and kind Henry to die.  And why her?  Drop takes on the form of a whodunit in its own Hitchcockian way.  Fahy and Sklenar are likable and we care about them.  Anyone who has ever said they were on a "first date from hell" didn't go through what Violet and Henry endure.  I wouldn't wish that on anyone, except maybe for the person who orchestrated all of this in the first place.  You wonder if this person couldn't have figured out a more efficient way to knock off Henry, but then small pleasures like Drop wouldn't have been made.