Drop - 2025 film review

Whatever else it may lack, the recent film Drop isn't short of pace. Things happen constantly in this suspenseful film directed by Christopher Landon. The opening scenes are dramatic as a woman faces a life or death situation. Does this happen before the main incidents of the film, or at its conclusion? It's not immediately obvious (at least it wasn't to me) but soon - I thought this was a flashback, but I was mistaken - we meet the woman in question, a therapist called Violet Gates (played, very well I thought, by Meghann Fahy. 

Violet is a single mother with a young son, Toby. Her sister Jen comes round to babysit, because Violet has finally got back into the dating scene, and she's agreed to meet a man, a photographer called Henry, at a very fancy restaurant with the excellent name of Palate. Henry is late, and Violet encounters a number of people, including the pianist, a female bartender, a fellow diner who bumps into her, and an older man who is also waiting to meet a first date.

Henry (Brandon Sklenar) finally shows up and an overly effusive waiter serves them. But Violet is distracted by a flurry of messages on her phone. These are 'digi-drops', sent by an unknown person in the vicinity. This person threatens Violet - unless she does what he says, her son and sister will be murdered. When Violet checks on her home security camera (the wonders of modern tech) she sees that this is no hoax - there is a masked man in her home, menacing Jen. 

Tension mounts rapidly as Violet tries to find out what is going on and who is sending the messages, and why. I thought this plot - complete with chilling moral dilemma - worked really well until shortly after the revelation of the culprit. What happens in the film after that is rather cartoonish, a sequence of melodramatic events that are lacking in the originality of the bulk of the storyline. A pity, because a potentially excellent, if pulpy, film is turned into something like the same-old, same-old.