As a rule, I’m not someone who puts *too* much stake in the plausibility of a movie’s plot. It’s a story, not real life, and if the inconsistencies or un-realisms serve the story’s purpose, then it doesn’t make sense to chastise a film for that. All of this is to say that Christopher Langdon’s Drop has one of the most stunningly stupid plots I’ve sat through for a long, long time. This claustrophobic, technophobic thriller (pretty much entirely set within one restaurant and across its character’s phone screens) is nonsense to the nth degree and, while it does squeeze some fun out of its absurdities, the end result is mostly a technically high-stakes thriller that ends up meaning exactly nothing.
It all starts intelligibly enough – Violet (Meghann Fahy) is a single mum of a five-year-old boy, getting ready for her first date in years following a hellishly abusive marriage to an ex who is now dead. As her icebreaker man, she’s picked hunky photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar), so she heads out to a fancy top-of-a-skyscraper restaurant (the film is set in Chicago but pretty clearly not actually filmed there) with her sister on babysitting duties. The early jitters are there – Henry runs a bit late, he’s underdressed to her overdress, and their waiter is a camp wannabe improv comedian – but it all starts nicely.
It’s a spell that is broken by a series of anonymously airdropped pictures and messages to Violet’s phone, initially just irritating memes but eventually instructions, backed by video evidence of a man in Violet’s house with a gun threatening her son and sister. Forced to keep the secret, Drop becomes a sort of comedy of manners as Violet tries to figure out who’s behind this (the conceit being that the person doing the drops has to be within 50 feet of her physically) while not alerting Henry (who has the patience of a saint), until the final instruction arrives – kill Henry.
Langdon and writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach keep this hidden-terror tension ticking along relatively nicely as the mystery unfurls, but with every escalation and revelation comes a new test to your suspension of disbelief until the grand finale descends into utter gibberish. When the evil mastermind is finally revealed, it’s to explain one of the dimmest, least effective, and most ill-planned evil schemes ever put to screen, the final confrontation more bewilderingly funny than dramatically powerful.
Fahy and Sklenar do their best to play this stuff pretty straight, each graduating from high-budget TV ensembles (her The White Lotus,him Yellowstone spin-off 1923) to movie leads relatively convincingly, and Langdon’s maximalist stylistic instincts add some grandeur to the highly contained action, but the stupidity here is fatal. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this sort of plotting would feel more at home in a children’s comic-book serial than in a movie for adults that actually premiered at a film festival (only SXSW, but still). At a brisk 90 minutes, it’s all over and done with before it can get *too* irritating, but your only lasting impression of Drop will be a sense of ‘wait…really?’
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 