"Drop"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Has there been a worse start to a year of movies than 2025? It's been a depressing year for anyone who likes movies but dislikes "content," which means I guess it's been a pretty good year if you want to spend your money going to see reheated remakes, retreads and CG-laden brand extensions. Searching for something with more substance? This has been an awful few months to do it.

Given that lousy state of affairs, it's easy to believe Drop feels as good and as exciting as it is because there are too few movies like it. Three decades ago, movies like Drop were a dime a dozen, now they're worth their weight in gold if only because of their scarcity.

But Drop isn't just good relatively — it's an uncommonly satisfying thriller, the kind of movie that makes you glad movies exist, not because of its artistic merits or its literary ambitions or its virtuosity, but because it really has none of those things. Drop just wants to entertain you, and it does that unusually well.

After seeing Drop, my head filled with questions, ranging from the general, non-spoiler kind (do people really play the "game" at the core of this movie?) to the incredibly specific, spoiler-filled kind, which I wouldn't dream of repeating here. But there are a lot of questions, some of which, it turns out, tear huge holes right through the story's plot.

And I don't care.

Drop does exactly what it sets out to do: Get us gripping the arm of our seat, or the arm next to us, and watching scenes through gritted teeth and half-closed eyes that can't quite take the suspense. And there's a lot of suspense. Despite what the movie's marketing wants you to believe, Drop isn't up there with Hitchcock, but it's at least up there with Stanley Donen, who made Charade.

The director here is Christopher Landon, whose other movies I haven't seen. In Drop, he and screenwriters Jillian Jacob and Chris Roach have created a crackling thriller that takes place almost entirely in one location — a swanky Chicago restaurant atop a high rise where single mom Violet (Meghann Fahy) has a first date with photographer Henry (Brendan Sklenar) that goes very, very wrong. Violet is targeted by what appears to be a prank — her phone is pummeled with messages urging her to play a game that seems suspiciously contrived. No matter. In short order, it's clear she's been targeted by someone very, very bad with even worse intentions.

It's a cat-and-mouse game caught inside a single-set location, all wound so tightly that there is barely time to breathe, much less question what's happening on screen. Even the preposterously overblown finale can't undo what's come before, in part because Fahy and Sklenar perform cinematic magic by getting us to believe in these characters. They're more than just pretty faces.

Whether the ultimate reveal of Drop is worth the wait is probably a bit suspect, but even there the movie doesn't pause long enough to let us overthink it. It's all wound tight, runs flawlessly, and entertains grandly. And after a movie year that has been this bad, any film that can do all those things is worth the price of admission. Drop most certainly is.

April 13, 2025 — AMC Topanga

1535