SXSW: Christopher Landon Keeps Turning Gimmicks Into Gold With ‘Drop’

First-date jitters are a given. Getting memes digitally dropped onto your phone from someone you don’t know who tells you to kill your date or your son will die kind of ups the stakes significantly. Directed by Christopher Landon and written by screenwriters Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, Drop (2025) is a thrill ride that allows the audience to get more and more engrossed in absurd circumstances while always understanding how to pull it back to the ground.

Produced by Jason Blum, Michael Bay, Brad Fuller, and Cameron Fuller, the film takes place in a swanky restaurant where Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widow with a young son named Toby (Jacob Robinson), is finally taking a step forward in putting herself once for once and going on a hot date with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a photographer that ticks every box.

While Violet and Henry hit it off at first, with her potential new love interest even taking the time to buy her son a gift, soon the chemistry slams on the breaks. Since Violet ordered her first drink, she started receiving anonymous drops to her phone. Using Digi-drop, someone in a small and expensive restaurant starts by sending her memes. As they get increasingly more threatening, the person on the other end will only stop after Violet kills her date.

When she blows off the messages, even as they shift from playful to aggressive, she quickly learns that the person terrorizing her has her son and sister Jan, the babysitter for the night, held in their home. If Violet wants to leave the date and come home to her kid, she has to kill her morals and then kill Henry.

Drop sets everything on the table in the first 20 minutes, then steps on the gas.

No stranger to genre film, Christopher Landon has already stunned audiences this year as the writer for the Valentine’s horror movie Heart Eyes. Not only that, but he has also showcased exactly how to take a gimmick and turn it into an audience-favorite concept as the writer-director on the body-switching slasher Freaky and the time-loop Happy Death Day and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U. 

Throw in a Netflix film with We Have a Ghost and my personal favorite addition to the longest-running found-footage franchise with Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and Drop had everything going for it. To make the film stick the landing, the cast, the production design, and the pacing must all line up for such an absurd scenario. And it does in Drop.

The film excels with its small cast of Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Ed Weeks, Reed Diamond, Gabrielle Ryan, Sarah McCormack, Jeffery Self, and Travis Nelson. To make the film stick, the landing, the cast, the production design, and the pacing must all line up for such an absurd scenario. And it does in Drop.

While the movie continuously pushes past expectations, the constraint of the single-location setting pushes for innovation. This makes it easy to lull into safety in the curved restaurant. In the beginning, when Henry tries to help Violet find the person harassing her, he shows her the radius, walking around the bar in the center and in view the entire time. Violet and Henry can see everything from their table except for the only person they need to identify.

Meghann Fahy makes easy work of capturing her audience. 

Meghann Fahy is absolutely charismatic, enthralling, and just one hell of an actress. Throughout Drop, Fahy is tasked with switching between emotions at the drop of a hat. Violet is resilient, but with her son’s life threatened, she is at the behest of what her digi-dropping puppet master wants her to do. Her eyes start to get red and swell with tears, only to be instructed to smile wider and keep her date at the table. She has buried her fear under the mask that the Digi-dropper requests, and any delay puts her family at an even larger risk.

But Fahy isn’t just there to be tormented as Violet. Drop can keep its pace of activity accelerating because Violet does not stop trying to find a way out. She isn’t a hapless damsel. Yes, her back is pressed against the wall, but to paraphrase something she’s told in the movie, she was dealt a bad hand and is doing the best she can with it. As we see flashbacks to her prior abuse, Christopher Landon and his team are careful not to use her trauma as necessary for strength but rather just as an element that has shown her she can survive and, more importantly, that she has to choose to act.

Violet’s choices are front and center in Drop—the dumb decisions, the smart decisions, and a Hail Mary or two. To do this, Christopher Landon frames each moment as a snowballing paranoia as Violet explores different choices for who is responsible for the threats and the instruction to kill Henry, who is just a really good guy.

As much as Fahy executes the movie’s most important character moments, Landon’s directorial eye on how to creatively shoot one location builds the anxiety. The radius that the Digi-dropper needs to be in is 50 feet, the restaurant is in full view, with only a slatted partition obscuring the view, and the rounded bathroom all make for a space that should give you comfort in knowing who is around you.

Through clever misdirections and strategic views of the classy restaurant, Landon makes sure that none of the visual storytelling tips the script’s hand. Each twist and misplaced assumption works to stoke the audience’s paranoia as much as Violet’s and makes not just for a tense film but also a fantastic game of “whodunnit” for the audience in their seats.

Christopher Landon understands how to capture thrilling threats and romance at the same time in Drop.

In addition to building out a clever, fast-paced thriller with the right amount of mystery, Drop is also a romance—and a good one at that. Henry is genuinely the perfect guy. Brandon Sklenar is extremely attractive, with a voice that immediately draws you in. But like any good date, the script allows the audience to learn more about him and understand that he is someone who should be genuinely protected.

This is also what makes Violet’s decision to kill the man in front of her or let her child and sister die an interesting problem to solve. However, the balance of Henry’s endearing demeanor and genuine care for Violet’s situation throughout the night and the reality that many moms in the audience probably wouldn’t hesitate to save their child over a first date is perfectly maintained. But Violet’s investment into coming out of the situation with everyone alive also allows her to grow closer to Henry as she talks to him at a deeper level than she would have if his life weren’t on the line. 

But where Drop really soars as a genre thrill ride is when the guardrails drop off in the final act. Every scene ups the stakes, the intensity, and the genres it embraces. The beginning hits on a romantic drama with Violet unpacking her previous trauma and setting up to take the plunge into dating, leaving her son for the first time. Then, it transitions into a paranoid surveillance thriller that highlights just how much someone can control your life from a bird’s eye view. Only to end as an action spectacle that pulls everything into place.

Christopher Landon’s paranoid thriller is excellent, to say the least. Each reveal is a switch flipped on a kinetic chain of events with a reveal that doesn’t over-index on exposition. Instead, Drop utilizes the whodunnit eye to capture the angle the audience (and Violet) couldn’t see.

Set mostly in a single location, Drop does the most to stoke paranoia but also explores all the ways for Violet to escape, ultimately paying off with a stellar finale. Part romance and all gas pedal, Drop is the kind of movie meant to headline SXSW. And once again, Christopher Landon knows just how to make a narrative gimmick into a genre thrill ride.

Drop (2025) screened as a part of the 2025 SWSW Film Festival and will release from Universal Pictures in theaters now.