Drop (2025) Review: A Date Night Thriller That Misses Every Beat

Drop (2025) Tries to Shock—But Only Stuns With Predictability

What happens when a high-concept thriller forgets to bring logic to the party? You get Drop (2025)—a shallow, cliché-heavy attempt at suspense that feels more like a tired genre exercise than a gripping cinematic experience.

Starring Meghann Fahy (The White Lotus), Drop centers on Violet, a widowed single mother dipping her toes back into the dating pool. Her date? A charming photographer named Henry (Brandon Sklenar), whom she meets at a posh restaurant high above the Chicago skyline. Sounds romantic—until the messages start arriving.

Through a fictionalized “Digi-Drop” (think AirDrop with a dramatic flair), Violet receives anonymous instructions: kill your date, or your son and sister—currently home under surveillance—die.

Same Old Tune, Played Poorly

The film leans hard on familiar thriller tropes: the voice on the phone controlling your every move (Phone Booth, Check-In), a heroine haunted by trauma, a romantic dinner that descends into chaos. But instead of reimagining these ideas, Drop recycles them with none of the style or intelligence that made them work before.

Writer-director Christopher Landon (known for Freaky and Happy Death Day) usually brings a fresh horror-comedy blend, but here, everything feels flat and mechanical. The screenplay, co-written by Gillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, piles on implausibilities—from unsecured networks to omniscient surveillance setups—with no effort to justify them.

Every twist hinges on assumptions that stretch suspension of disbelief to its breaking point. Why would Violet’s Digi-Drop be open to strangers? Why is her house apparently wired with cameras in every room? The villain’s scheme depends on far too many perfect variables—none of which the film explains.

A Dreadful Date Night

The central set piece in Drop (2025) is supposed to be a slow-burn, edge-of-your-seat dinner date turned nightmare—but instead, it spirals into an exhausting exercise in repetition and awkwardness. Violet, already rattled by her past trauma, tries to maintain composure while being manipulated by an anonymous stalker threatening her family through a series of creepy “Digi-Drop” messages. As a viewer, you’re primed to expect tension, perhaps even Hitchcockian suspense. Instead, what unfolds is painfully predictable and strangely slow.

Throughout the dinner, Violet repeatedly leaves the table under increasingly unconvincing pretenses, giving her date Henry every reason to question her behavior. She delivers rushed excuses, half-hearted apologies, and keeps restarting the date as if nothing's wrong—even as she’s clearly unraveling. Meanwhile, the villain—who's supposedly orchestrating everything in real time—acts with an inexplicable lack of urgency. His movements are sluggish, his actions oddly delayed, making the supposed high-stakes threat feel oddly distant.

Rather than escalating the pressure or tightening the tension, the pacing grows lethargic. Scenes drag, and dialogue meanders. The few suspenseful moments that do exist are either undercut by bad logic or drowned in exposition. By the time the film reaches its third act, any hope for a clever twist or emotionally satisfying payoff vanishes. Instead, you get a finale that leans on tired genre clichés—every beat foreseeable, every decision baffling. The ending lands not with a gasp, but a sigh, ticking all the boxes of a phoned-in thriller.

Fahy Tries—But Can't Save It

In a film that asks the audience to swallow a buffet of implausible plot twists and cartoonish logic, Meghann Fahy stands out as the one element trying to ground things in reality. Best known for her layered performance in The White Lotus season two, Fahy clearly brings depth, intensity, and emotional nuance to Violet—traits sorely lacking in the rest of the film. She’s in nearly every scene, anchoring the chaos with a performance that’s far better than the material deserves.

You can see the effort in her eyes. She commits fully to Violet’s unraveling mental state, shifting from vulnerable to fiercely protective with genuine emotion. Unfortunately, she’s saddled with a screenplay that doesn’t support her. The dialogue is clunky, her character’s decisions make little sense, and no matter how hard she tries, she can’t elevate a plot that feels like it was lifted from a streaming-era thriller assembly line.

Director Christopher Landon has had success in the past with offbeat horror comedies like Happy Death Day and Freaky, where his blend of humor and tension hit the mark. But in Drop, his usual spark is missing. The tonal shifts are abrupt, the horror elements fall flat, and the psychological drama is too shallow to resonate. What’s left is a lukewarm mess that never quite knows what it wants to be.

In the end, not even Fahy’s best efforts can rescue Drop from its own lazy storytelling. It’s like watching a talented chef try to save a meal with spoiled ingredients—admirable, but ultimately futile.

Final Verdict: Skip It

Drop isn’t just uninspired—it’s insulting to viewers who expect thrillers to at least try to make sense. With sloppy logic, wooden tension, and a narrative that seems to hope you're not paying attention, it’s a frustratingly forgettable experience.

Sometimes, the scariest thing isn’t the villain on the phone—it’s the feeling that you’ve wasted two hours of your life.

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