Drop (2025, directed by Christopher Landon) shows us the perils of modern-day dating. Two people matched on a dating app, and one is linked to a would-be corruption scandal from a government official.
Again, we must suspend our disbelief here and enjoy the frustrating twists of the reality of mobile phone swiping leading to disasters. This is a great cinematic display of a limited setting: the movie mainly revolves inside a fancy restaurant at one of an American city’s high rises.
Meghann Fahey delivers the exemplary role of a married widow ready for the dating scene. Opposite her is Brandon Sklenar, who is her date, a rugged, handsome man with some evidence of political wrongdoing.
At the start of the date, Fahey gets messages asking her to receive the photos “dropped” to her phone. The dropped images and texts instruct her to destroy the evidence and kill her date, or else her son and sister will be murdered. Even with the technological wizardry of closed-circuit cameras in the home, it becomes menacing.
First, the restaurant’s production design is worthy of a Condé Nast cover story. The circular interior provides ample opportunities for confusion, helplessness, and worry. The tall glass windows show an eye-boggling skyline of bright lights, which is, at first, romantic, but then you realize you are trapped inside that beautiful restaurant like an expensive fishbowl.
The consistent involvement of circular features, like the oval bathroom, makes it feel like you are looking through a lens. This can have such a suffocating effect. It is a credible action flick without bombast.
Two of the film’s producers are known brands in filmmaking: Michael Bay for dynamic and pulsating action and Jason Blum of the Blumhouse reputation, which is known for abject horror strung with tense storytelling.
Director Landon is famous for his filmmaking credits in the Paranormal Activity films, a comedy-horror film entitled Scout Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, and some mind-bending terror films like Happy Death Day. Taken together, these men produced a film that perfectly terrorizes a woman with a young child.
Drop offers the notion that horror is constant, but how one becomes horrified changes. For now, mobile phone drops from strangers are perilous in present-day communication. This will grow old the same way as The Lawnmower Man, which has become a funny movie now, but it was a horrific proposition of being embedded by technology then. The drop shows us the motions of dating with technology.
How does it feel if your date keeps checking their phone instead of conversing with you? One of the most incredible aspects of the movie is that the guy she was dating is still hanging on. Despite the red flags she has displayed throughout the film, he must like her.
The characters’ motivation to gladly go into circles in a movie about establishing a possible relationship is exhausting. But at least it’s a Michael Bay–Blumhouse film, so we are assured of practical filmmaking.
