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

Guest Post: The Monkey (2025)

The Monkey

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

The Monkey, based on a Stephen King short story, is more an exercise than a movie. Death becomes so trivial that the cornucopia of mutilations portrayed rolls off one’s back as innocuously as clouds in the sky drift on the screen. Without a point of view or commentary, the film is empty, even if it is a lot of fun. 

Twins from an erratic broken home fear that their new toy, a drumming monkey, is causing the violent deaths in their neighborhood. They bury the menace, but it returns with a vengeance years later. As an adult, Hal (played by Theo James, who also plays his twin Bill) can’t stop his life from unraveling. His wife has left him for a marriage guru (Elijah Wood in an amusing cameo), and he has lost custody of his child (Colin O'Brien). When he discovers the cursed creature has returned, he tracks down Bill to stop the toy once and for all. 

Written by Osgood Perkins, whose Longlegs made a splash last year, adapted the film with a mission of working out his own childhood traumas. He had told Empire Magazine, “The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways. So, I thought: Well, I'm an expert on that.' Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways” – father, Anthony, Norman Bates of Psycho, publicly suffered with AIDS before dying, and mother, Berry Berenson, died as a passenger of the plane that crashed into the North Tower on 9/11. 

A spirit of futility oozes through the script and mise-en-scene. Perkins does capture an otherworldliness which works with the humorous tone despite the nihilistic nature of the story. For instance, this is the kind of movie you want to shout at the screen, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT MOVIE YOU’RE IN??? DON”T go to a hibachi restaurant!!!!!” to no avail.

Perkins exploits the design of the creature for maximum effect.  Its presence is pure menace: with huge eyes and a vicious grin, a pulled back face like it had a bad face lift, every tooth visible and ready to rip someone apart, uncomfortably stiff like it’s ready to explode. The big joke is that the creature barely moves in the film and physically commits no murders, making it creepier. A Rube Goldberg series of events leads to decapitations, skewerings and bursting blood vessels.

The performances set the tone, including Tatiana Maslany as the twin’s loopy mother, Wood as the self-impressed interloper (he should have been given more screentime), Perkins as an uncomfortably pervy uncle, and Adam Scott as the kid’s frenetic dad. James handles the weight of being the protagonist, the straight man in an insane world, and his parental chemistry with O’Brien makes you care about their storyline. 

The Monkey satirizes life and nightmarish adolescence in a clever, but ultimately unrewarding way. Nothing is to be taken seriously (even a funeral has no gravity). That can sting, especially in this current world order, but in a film where people are just meat with no control over circumstances and no weight in this universe, it is difficult to do anything but point and laugh.