In ‘Drop,’ Meghann Fahy Looks At Her Phone For 90 Minutes, Followed By Extreme Violence

‘Drop’ is a nasty little exploitation picture in disguise as a fun, snarky modern puzzlebox thriller. Its real reason for existence is to show women in various stages of physical distress. Women get clubbed over the head in this movie, thrown down the stairs, shot, stabbed, and casually tossed all over the kitchen like Nerf objects. Some men come to harm, too, but it’s mostly women. In between an extremely violent beginning and a distressingly violent denouement, Drop features a lot of scenes of people looking nervously at their phones.

Meghann Fahy, best known from Season 2 of The White Lotus, plays Violet, who is a widow and a survivor of domestic abuse. She makes her living as an online counselor for female survivors of domestic abuse, a job that pays so well that she and her annoying five-year-old son, Toby, can afford to stay in a beautiful and large upper-middle-class suburban home, equipped with more security cameras than a Bond villain’s lair, and somehow conveniently located a five-minute drive from downtown Chicago.

DROP ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Christopher Landon
Written by: Jillian Jacobs, Chris Roach
Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Reed Diamond
Running time: 100 mins

Violet, just now breaking out of her trauma shell, goes on a date with a handsome photographer who’s so bland, you’d have to dip him in a vat of Cholula hot sauce to make him even vaguely palatable. As soon as the date commences, she starts receiving annoying air drop messages that gradually inform her that she has to kill her new companion or her son Toby will die. She knows that her tormentor is serious because she can see on her Bond villain security cameras that there’s a black-masked assassin waiting downstairs while her vaguely bohemian sister reads Toby a bedtime story upstairs.

This is actually the premise of an actual movie, and the only reason it’s watchable at all is because Fahy has an undeniably foxy screen presence. She deservedly received an Emmy nomination for The White Lotus, and is equally good and watchable in Drop. But the screenwriter is no Mike White. Most of the movie is her looking at her phone and looking worried.

Drop builds tension, and maybe there’s a little weak humor. Her date, a himbo named Henry played by Brandon Sklenar (Spencer Dutton in 1923, among many other credits), takes her to what looks like an impossibly expensive restaurant called Palate, which is on the top floor of an enormous skyscraper. The Bear, this is not. A bit with a “funny” waiter falls completely flat, and the other characters working in the restaurant are beyond cliched. The food on the menu would have been out of date in a 1980s rom-com. It’s no accident that there’s a party of teens there on prom night.

It’s somewhat appropriate, because the movie descends into ludicrous Prom Night gore at the end. I think in its heart, Drop wants to be a movie about a good woman learning to escape the cycle of abuse. And there’s a long history of female-centered Revenge-O-Matic movies. Obviously, Drop is no Kill Bill, the queen of the genre, but it also doesn’t live up to recent entries in the genre, like Ready or Not. Its tech-centeredness, and its refusal to literally never drop the phones, outweighs any vague message it may be trying to convey. The plot, once it comes together, is far too stupid and unrealistic to justify the mayhem that follows.

That said, Fahy is a sympathetic protagonist, and she gives this dumb script her star-turn best. There’s a fast and loud white-knuckle quality to the suspense, even if the pacing is a little off. And the movie is reasonably short, appropriate for what amounts to an exploitative carnival ride.

For all the stress in the movie, nothing stressed me out more than the fact that Violet and Henry never touched their entrees. That’s upwards of $100 worth of restaurant food that you’re leaving on the table, there, people! I don’t care how much money you make, that is a crime. But nothing could be worse than the fact that Henry ordered his Kobe beef filet cooked medium. That is beyond a red flag. Violet, girl, run away. There can never be a second date.