When a killer calls

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2025 (210 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You know those public service announcements the theatres run before movies, telling you to turn off your phone? (“Don’t be a Tommy Texter!”)

You’ll be glad you listened when you watch this super-compressed tech thriller, which might get you looking sideways at your device and all its intrusive, information-hungry apps.

Meghann Fahy (best known for playing Daphne in the second season of The White Lotus) is Violet, a young widow who is tentatively venturing back into the dating world.

Leaving her young son Toby (Jacob Robinson) at home with her sister Jen (Violett Beane), Violet is finally going for an in-person meetup with Henry (Brandon Sklenar from It Ends with Us), a man she met on a dating app and has been chatting with for weeks.

Violet is a little nervous, but it’s nothing a glass of Malbec can’t help, at least until an AirDrop invite on her phone goes from weird to menacing to potentially murderous.

Violet’s anonymous contact tells her that if she tries to leave the restaurant, her son will die. If she tells Henry what’s happening, her son will die. If she attempts to contact the police, her son will die.

The threats are backed up by footage of her house, where she can see a masked intruder.

As Violet tries to track the source of the messages, which are coming from inside the restaurant, director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky) and scripting team Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach (Truth or Dare) tighten the suspense, deftly combining extreme tech paranoia with the more mundane jitters of an awkward first date.

Fahy plays Violet as smart and tough and resourceful, and Sklenar gives a performance of scruffy, self-deprecating charm. The two leads somehow manage to pull off believable chemistry, despite the almost constantly buzzing phone lying between them on the table. There’s even minor comic relief with the pair’s adorably incompetent, oversharing waiter Matt (Jeffery Self).

The restaurant is located high up in a glass-and-steel Chicago skyscraper, and Landon makes the most of its sleek, dark, overdesigned surfaces. In fact, he really seems to be enjoying the movie’s deliberately set limitations as he explores and exploits not just the physical space of the restaurant, but the virtual realm of the average phone with its vast amounts of (supposedly) private digital data.

Almost everyone in the movie is texting, scrolling, sharing and snapping pictures. And then there are the restaurant’s surveillance and security systems, adding more layers to the film’s pervasive sense of technological threat.

There are some drawbacks to the story’s self-contained approach. Violet’s adversary remains unseen and unheard for most of the film’s runtime, represented only as text messages that float on the screen, so we don’t get a developed villain. The conspiracy that sets the whole nightmarish evening in motion is barely sketched in.

Most problematically, domestic abuse is used as a plot device, though overall Drop approaches this theme more responsibly than 2024’s It Ends With Us (another movie in which Sklenar plays a sensitive would-be boyfriend).

Still, while the premise is a bit silly and the subsequent action a bit implausible, there’s a brisk, unassuming skill in the way Landon handles things. Drop is not ambitious, but it is entertaining and effective, and it might just get you deleting some of your risky apps on the way out of the theatre.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca