The Thriller Drop Is a Perfect Addition to the Bad-First-Date Canon

Drop isn’t really a cautionary tale about mindfulness and staying present in the age of devices. But it’s not not about that, either. Its heroine, Violet (Meghann Fahy), is on her first date in years with a guy named Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a solicitous dreamboat who’s unfazed by the fact that she’s a widow with a young child who had to be coaxed through three months of skittish texting before she agreed to meet up in person. Despite how improbably perfect and focused on her he is, she just can’t stay off her phone. She has good reason to be distracted — someone in the restaurant where they’re sitting has arranged to have her son and her sister taken hostage, and is threatening to kill them if she doesn’t do what they say, up to and including offing the man across the table from her. It’s a perfectly preposterous set-up for a thriller, but the core of Fahy’s agonizingly distracted performance is something real and recognizable. Violet wants to give Henry her attention, both because she likes him and because her unknown subjugator has made it clear that very bad things will happen if he leaves. And yet her mind is elsewhere, conversations fading out, her thoughts consumed with the orders that keep pinging on her screen. There’s a moment early on, when the villain first introduces himself by the way of a series of menacing macros, where I had the thought that this whole scenario could have been averted with judicious use of a focus app.

There are actually a lot of things that could make the situation Violet finds herself in fall apart. Drop — the title refers to “DigiDrop,” the movie’s non-proprietary version of AirDrop — presents a digital Rube Goldberg solution to a problem that could have been more efficiently addressed by getting someone to hit Henry with a car or shove him out a window. But you don’t seek out a movie like this one, directed by Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon and written by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, for how much sense it makes, but for how it riffs on its premise. And Drop, which just premiered at SXSW and opens in theaters April 11, riffs awfully well. It allows Violet to come across as smart without saddling her with improbable skills as she tries to wriggle out of the trap, and it doesn’t require her to do irrational shit just to support the plot. For instance — when Violet first starts getting the mysterious drops, she doesn’t needlessly keep them a secret but immediately shows them to Henry in some reassuringly real-person behavior. He downplays them as a prank while guessing who the culprit might be, a game that allows some exposition about how close in proximity the character responsible has to be. In its liveliest stretch, Drop attaches life-and-death stakes to first-date behavior, teasing out how many odd actions — like requesting a table change and disappearing repeatedly into the bathroom — Violet can get away with before Henry cuts and runs.

That stretch makes up the bulk of the movie, which at a neat 95 or so minutes was clearly made with the awareness that the worst thing a film like this could do is overstay its welcome. The restrictions Drop sets for itself, including the fact that it takes place almost entirely in Palate, a posh Chicago joint full of blond wood beams and warm lighting that’s perched at the top of a skyscraper, might bring to mind M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, another thriller that married a high concept with grounding in a specific location. But the film Drop shares the most DNA with is Wes Craven’s superb 2005 thriller Red Eye, in which Cillian Murphy flirts with Rachel McAdams at an airport bar, then ends up seated next to her on their flight — at which point he reveals himself to be an operative using threats on her father’s life to make McAdams’s character use her professional connections to enable a terrorist attack. As in Red Eye, there’s trauma underscoring Drop’s main storyline, and the fact that Violet is the survivor of a brutally abusive relationship is where the movie most threatens to get out over its skis. But Fahy holds the enterprise together. As her big scene in The White Lotus demonstrated, she’s capable of performing whole internal soliloquies with just that incredibly expressive face, and she’s equally terrific here, keeping us aware of the roar of panic drowning out everything around Violet while she tries to look serene and engaged. I mean it as the highest praise when I say it is eerily like being around someone who is getting eaten up online and who keeps checking their feeds despite knowing they shouldn’t look. In Violet’s case, at least she’s justified in not being able to log off.