Guest Post: The Drop (2025)

Getting The Drop on Meghan Fahy

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen 

The Drop, a new thriller directed by Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day), lifts storylines from a slew of films, classics like Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and Wes Craven’s Red Eye, to entertaining schlock like the Doris Day shocker Midnight Lace. Landon has a strong sense of tension and keeps this film entertaining despite well worn material. But it’s Meghan Fahy, who stole scenes in White Lotus’ season two, who keeps audiences riveted. 

Violet (Fahy) ventures onto a blind date for the first time since her husband’s death with Henry, a handsome photographer (Brandon Sklenar). She starts the evening apprehensive and hopeful, mingling with the bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), the unctuous restaurant pianist (Ed Weeks), and other desperate diners, until her date arrives. The evening would have been wonderful, except for the messages bombarding her phone challenging her to play a game. Violet ignores these annoyances until the anonymous stranger demands she kill her date. Her terrorizer appears to have eyes and ears everywhere, and as wily as Violet can get, the harasser appears several steps ahead, and with an armed accomplice inside HER house, with her sister and son. 

Landon, who has taken the tropes of other films like Groundhog Day and Freaky Friday and reinvented them as horror comedies like Happy Death Day and Freaky, doesn’t pervert the genre as much this time. The plot points are rather standard, which is a bit disappointing. To be fair, he didn’t write Drop, unlike the others. Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach of Fantasy Island and Truth or Dare, two horror duds, had.  Maybe had Landon rewritten the film it would have that sense of something radical. As a director, Landon successfully builds  Hitchcockian tension: a character isolated in a crowded room, long camera moves up to heaven as if god is omniscient but impotent to help. He also achieves a manipulation of sound and of silence to tweak the pressure. 

Fahy is always so likable and here she has the audience completely in her corner, praying for her safety. The cast is charming, with comedian Jeffery Self riotous as the waiter with no sense of personal space. Once they are revealed, the glib villain makes you want to reach through the screen and throttle them, making their eventual downfall all the more delicious. 

In the last year, Christopher Landon has taken single duties in films.  He only wrote Heart Eyes, and only directed this.  Since those films where he has complete control are his most entertaining and successful, perhaps he needs to return to double dipping