After catching up with LOCKED I thought what the hell, I should also see that other recent high concept thriller I kinda meant to see. DROP is the one that Christopher Landon (HAPPY DEATH DAY, FREAKY) went and directed after leaving SCREAM 7 because he didn’t have a movie anymore after the producers (Spyglass Entertainment) fired the star for posting about the genocide in Gaza. (Specifically because she was against it.) I’m not sure what Landon thought about that but he went and worked with the… hopefully at least less evil production company power couple of Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes.

Landon usually writes his movies, but this one is by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach (TRUTH OR DARE, FANTASY ISLAND). It feels a little different from his other stuff, being about people in their thirties, but I think you can still feel his sensibilities in it.

Violet (Meghann Fahy, YOUR MONSTER) is a therapist who has been through some traumatizing shit herself. Her husband Blake (Michael Shea, NIGHTRIDE) was an abusive psycho who died under circumstances we will learn more about later. Now enough time has passed that she is very nervously attempting to re-enter the world of dating. Her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane, The Flash) gives her a pep talk and swears she’ll be okay babysitting little Toby (Jacob Robinson).

The date is at Palate, a fancy-ass restaurant in the top of a tower. (I like how she takes a deep breath and looks up at the tower, nervous about the date, but establishing to us how high somebody might fall from later.) Her date Henry (Brandon Sklenar, EMILY THE CRIMINAL) seems worthy of a Hallmark movie – a handsome, kind dude, funny, has a good rapport with her. They’d been communicating on a dating app for a while and he was understanding about the delay, and also about her wanting to leave her phone on the table in case of babysitting emergency.

That’s why she notices the weird messages she starts getting, which seem like maybe a prank – they try to figure out who’s nearby watching them, and Henry first suspects a table of prom kids. But it escalates to threats against her kid and sister, and since she’s paranoid enough to have a feed of her security cameras she’s able to confirm a stranger with a gun and a ski mask in the house. Much like the recently-turned-twenty Wes Craven picture RED EYE, an operative is using threats against a family member to force Violet to do his dirty work, in this case erasing incriminating photos Henry has on an SD card in his bag and – much worse – poisoning his drink. So she has to figure some way out of this while also not letting her date or the waiters know anything is wrong.

I think this movie has a pretty big hurdle to get over at the beginning, and for me it does get over it, but I feel like I gotta mention it. The premise involves getting these anonymous messages and rather than just say it’s an unknown caller the movie makes up a fictional app called Digi-Drops where you can only message people within 50 feet? The storytelling advantage of this is that the couple can try to do detective work looking at the profiles on the app and checking who’s within 50 feet. But the trade off is that we have to accept that for some reason every person in this restaurant is on Digi-Drops? An app that the couple both agree is annoying? I just did not buy it at all. It’s a relief when they stop talking about it.

Of course there has to be a cast of supporting characters to interact with, mostly employees of Palate: the friendly bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan, Power Book IV: Force), the sleazy pianist Phil (Ed Weeks, The Mindy Project), mostly their funny-coded waiter Matt (Jeffery Self, Search Party), who starts telling them about his improv classes and they agree he’s “a little much.” (He is.) She also talks to an older man also nervous to be on a date, and he’s played by Reed Diamond (MONEYBALL), who I know from three seasons of playing Detective Mike Kellerman on Homicide: Life on the Street, so I’m always happy to see him pop up, including here.

RED EYE really is the closest comparison I can think of. DROP is 95 minutes, has a square but likable protagonist, sets up the gimmick and then dutifully goes through all the mechanics set up by the scenario, and goes out with a bang (with a showdown in the sanctity of her home). There’s a big FX/stunt shot that was in the trailer and I get why they had to show it, though it would’ve been a cool surprise because it doesn’t feel like a movie that’s necessarily gonna take it to that level. I was happy to discover that (non-specific spoiler) it does break out of the contained location and build to some well-done action.

There’s also a little style to it. It does a good job of compositing phone text into scenes to look appealing, and there’s one really cool part where the security feeds from her phone are superimposed three-dimensionally over the walls around her.

Landon is obviously doing his Hitchcock and DePalma shit, but I like that you can tell that without him directly mimicking how they would’ve done it.

I’d also say you can see Landon’s horror roots here, even though his horror has always been light-hearted. When the shit goes down some horrible things happen to people who really don’t deserve it. I guess it’s PG-13 but it’s not bloodless. It hits a few nerves.

You know what, I would like to shout out production designer Susie Cullen (I KILL GIANTS, ABIGAIL), because the design of the restaurant is really important to this all working. There’s a very clear geography of the entrance, where the bar is, where the piano is, who’s at some of the other tables in relation to where our main characters are sitting, and there’s this big window with a city view (I assume fake, but believable enough for me). It looks good and it’s very effective.

I guess there aren’t a whole lot of thrillers that I’d consider among my favorite movies, and DROP is no exception. It’s another “check this out if you’re in the mood for something quick and easy” type of recommendation. But it does its job of squeezing some thrills out of a clever set up, giving the characters a little bit (a very little bit) more personality and relatable qualities than required, and taking the battle a little further than I expected. Can she save her kid without totally ruining her date? Tune in to find out. Not bad.