Pick Up What This Techno-Thriller is Putting Down

Drop opens in theaters Friday, April 11. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.

Usually, the most harrowing thing that might happen if you fail to modify your AirDrop settings is a bunch of teenagers sending you random dick pics – a scenario that’s tweaked in the new Christopher Landon-directed techno-thriller Drop. Landon, who also made Happy Death Day and Freaky, loves a gimmick. And “What if phone, but scary?” sure seems like one. Fortunately, Drop is more interested in thrilling the audience than winking at us, and is a more entertaining film as a result.

Drop makes harassment-by-Bluetooth scary by pivoting away from the prankster angle early on. At first, Violet (Meghann Fahy) is annoyed when someone starts sending her random memes as she waits for her date to arrive at a swanky restaurant on the 38th floor of a Chicago skyscraper. Then the messages start getting more personalized, and Violet realizes that whoever is targeting her – she’s not sure who, but it has to be someone within 50 feet, given their weapon of choice – is watching her, setting a locked-room mystery plot into motion.

The obvious question here is, “Why doesn’t she just switch off her phone and leave?” And that’s where the kid in peril comes in. Violet is a single mother, widowed in an incident that’s teased in the movie’s cold open but whose traumatizing details aren’t revealed until the very end. Violet has spent most of the five years since holed up at home with her son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), who was a baby when his dad died and is now a precocious kid with glasses and intense separation anxiety. When she pushes back, Violet’s mystery contact starts threatening Toby, and Drop is just mean enough that we can’t be certain that the little guy will make it out of this alive.

Violet isn’t handling her first time away from Toby since his infancy very well either, compounding her jitters about meeting Henry (Brandon Sklenar), the handsome photographer she’s been messaging on a dating app for the past three months. Henry is patient and understanding, and genuinely interested in building a relationship; without revealing too much, it’s very unlikely that he’s the one provoking Violet. And in a movie landscape choked with well-meaning but hacky takedowns of monstrous men hiding behind friendly façades, it’s kind of refreshing to have a movie where the nice guy is actually, well, nice.

Drop’s tight structure and compounding twists are reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan, with the major difference being that Shyamalan would never get as snarky as Landon does in the first act. Search Party’s Jeffery Self carries much of the comedic burden as an oversharing, eager-to-please waiter, who loses patience with Violet’s increasingly bizarre requests but has to keep smiling and accommodating her. (This is a very expensive restaurant.) There are some sick giggles to be had later on, one of them an R-rated Spielberg bit involving Toby, a loaded handgun, and a remote controlled car. But for the most part, Drop abandons the wisecracks once the stakes reach life-or-death heights.

Not every part of this more earnest approach works: Even when it’s not a-joke-a-minute, a Christopher Landon movie is probably not the place to be exploring themes of domestic abuse. But the fundamentals of action, tension, and escalating suspense are strong, and Landon makes great use of the claustrophobic central location and its vertigo-inducing heights. This unpretentious thrill ride is a fun diversion, and a surprisingly good date movie – providing your date isn’t too triggered by a lounge-piano rendition of “Baby Shark.” Parenthood is difficult, y’all.