‘Drop’ Review: A Tense, Old-School Suspense Story Updated for the iPhone Era

The “telephone threat thriller” has evolved with every technological shift. Once, a late-night call to a landline was enough to send chills down a viewer’s spine. Then came phone booths, and later mobile phones, pushing the genre toward more personal and immediate forms of danger: text messages, audio notes, social media. Drop takes things a step further, rooting its tension in a file-sharing technology familiar to iPhone users but far less so to anyone outside the Apple ecosystem. The movie’s entire threat relies on AirDrop — that system that allows nearby Apple devices to exchange files within a short physical radius.

That detail matters, because Drop follows a woman receiving threats through this system while trying to keep her composure in the middle of a first date. Violet (Meghann Fahy, The White Lotus) is a widow, mother of a young child, and a survivor of domestic abuse. She is trying to reenter the world of dating, leaving her son with her sister for the night and meeting a photographer she connected with online at an upscale downtown Chicago restaurant. When Henry (Brandon Sklenar, 1923) sits down, Violet starts receiving “drops” — messages from a nearby phone, clearly from someone watching her.

For about 80 minutes, director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day) builds suspense using a single location with multiple rooms and vantage points. The film may not be reinventing the premise, but the script by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach crafts a chain of increasingly stressful situations that are doubly uncomfortable because they unfold in the awkward terrain of a first date. Landon uses the physical space and social tension of the restaurant to keep the film tight, focused, and claustrophobic.

At first, the messages seem like a prank — after all, anyone with an Apple device can send an AirDrop without knowing the recipient’s number. But Violet soon realizes the threats are real. The unknown sender claims to have people inside her home and proves it by sending her images from her own security cameras. What follows is a tense cat-and-mouse setup: Violet must complete a series of instructions without Henry noticing, all while scanning the restaurant and trying to figure out who among the staff and clientele could be behind the messages. Is it the waiter? The bartender? The hostess? Or could Henry himself be involved?

Where Drop falters is in its final act. Once the film reaches its resolution, much of the carefully built logic explodes — almost literally — and the story veers into full-tilt action territory that feels disconnected from everything that came before. The climax introduces a few unpleasant surprises that can’t be detailed without spoilers, but the tone shift is so abrupt that the thread of plausibility snaps. For viewers who judge this kind of thriller primarily by its ending, the payoff may feel disappointing.

But taken on the whole, Drop remains a solid piece of suspense filmmaking — a modern riff on the classic “telephone terror” thriller, updated for the AirDrop age. It may stumble in the home stretch, but for most of its running time, it proves that with the right setup, a smartphone can still be as frightening as a ringing landline ever was.