by Jason Osiason

Drop wants to be a lot of things, a taut single-location thriller, a trauma drama, a glossy tech-paranoia mystery, and a bit of a date-night nail-biter. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just sort of… there. There’s real tension in it, strong performances, and a clean, high-stakes setup that should carry it all the way through. But the movie can’t figure out what lane it’s in, and by the time it gets to its big final swing, it fumbles what could’ve been a killer moment.

Meghann Fahy plays Violet, a recently widowed therapist trying to ease her way back into dating. She’s reserved but present, the kind of person you can tell has lived through some things without the movie needing to spell it all out. Her date, Henry, is kind, attentive, maybe a little too polished—but their chemistry feels real. And just as you’re starting to root for her to have a normal night, her phone lights up with a strange message. Then another. And suddenly the movie shifts into something darker. She’s being watched, threatened, and coerced through a string of anonymous “DigiDrop” messages. Someone in the restaurant is pulling strings, and she has to play along or risk putting her family in danger.

The setup works. It’s tense, self-contained, and plays into real fears about privacy and control. The way the threat escalates is smart and makes you hyper-aware of everyone in the room. The movie wants you scanning faces the way she is, looking for tells. Fahy holds it together beautifully. You believe her fear. You believe her calculation. The movie is at its best when it lets her sit in that quiet panic.

But the dialogue often trips over itself. A lot of it feels written instead of spoken—over-explained or leaning too hard on genre tropes. And that tonal inconsistency starts to take a toll. Sometimes the movie is self-aware enough to flirt with camp, sometimes it’s dead serious and emotionally grounded, and other times it leans into a slick thriller mode. Each of those versions could’ve worked on their own, but here they never quite mesh. It keeps pulling you out of the story just when you’re settling in.

The ending, though, is where the whole thing kind of unravels. No spoilers, but let’s just say the main character makes a choice that feels entirely for show delivering a dramatic reveal that she absolutely didn’t need to say out loud. It breaks the internal logic of the character and deflates the tension rather than paying it off. It’s not even campy fun. It’s just… puzzling.

Still, I respect that the film ties Violet’s past trauma into the plot without turning it into exploitation. It handles the domestic violence backstory with more care than most thrillers would. It informs her decisions without defining her. That nuance helps the movie feel more grounded than it otherwise might’ve been.

There’s good stuff here. Real tension. A lead performance that deserves a better movie. Some interesting ideas about tech, vulnerability, and how quickly a normal evening can slide into nightmare. But the uneven tone, clunky dialogue, and an ending that feels like it was written for applause rather than logic hold it back.