Modernizing the paranoid templates of thrillers like Joel Schumacher’s “Phone Booth” (2003) and Wes Craven’s “Red Eye” (2005), “Drop” invites us to observe a disastrous dinner date with a potentially fatal dessert.
The unsuspecting diners are Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widowed therapist with a traumatic past, and Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a hunky photographer with a debatable future. After three months of skittish texting, Violet has finally agreed to meet Henry in person at a luxury restaurant atop a Chicago skyscraper. And just as she’s overcoming her first-date jitters — and the dizzying view from their window table — her phone beeps: Someone is sending anonymous, increasingly menacing messages using an AirDrop-style app that only operates within 50 feet. It would be easier to identify the culprit if every one of their fellow diners were not also staring at their phones.
Like a Jenga tower with half the pieces removed, Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s wobbly script grows more preposterous by the minute. (Not least because no woman as cautious as Violet would be this careless with her phone’s privacy settings.) Which doesn’t mean that “Drop” isn’t fun: Park your left brain at the door and enjoy Ben Baudhuin’s snappy editing, Marc Spicer’s glowing, gliding images and the easy chemistry between the two leads. The mood might be more ick than eek, but Fahy is wickedly entertaining as a woman casting around for an escape from her online tormentor — if she fails to obey his commands, the sister and young son she left at home will be murdered — and charming the seemingly saintly Henry into finishing a date with someone he must believe to be at least a little nuts.
While reprising the kicky, repetitive style that drove “Happy Death Day” in 2017 and, two years later, its less compelling sequel, the director Christopher Landon diverts us with visual gimmicks. Cell messages splay across the screen and inside a bathroom stall, and a shoal of brunette herrings swim through the movie. Apparently, almost every man in Chicago — including Violet’s date, her meter reader and a random encounter at the bar — sports brown hair and a beard. Just like her unidentified attacker in the film’s opening scene.
Fortified by a handful of solid supporting players (like Jeffery Self as a wildly oversharing server), “Drop” is pleasantly silly and minimally suspenseful. And when, in an utterly bonkers final section, the soothing sounds of upscale dining skid into a convulsion of action and last-minute plot dumping, your expression may mirror that of poor, baffled Henry.
Yet Sklenar — who, after last year’s “It Ends With Us,” is carving a niche for himself as a soft landing for traumatized women — is, like a perfect zabaglione, hot and sweet in a role that demands little more. After witnessing Violet’s jittery table changes and multiple bathroom breaks, he seems only minimally vexed, and never once inquires if she has a urinary tract infection. Now that’s a keeper.
Drop
Rated PG-13. Blood is spilled and a babysitter is stabbed. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
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