Drop (2025)
Directed by Christopher Landon
Violet, a widowed mother on her first date in years, arrives at an upscale restaurant where she is relieved that her date, Henry, is more charming and handsome than she expected. But their chemistry begins to curdle as Violet begins being irritated and then terrorized by a series of anonymous drops to her phone.
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37 films that influenced Drop
What critics say influenced Drop
Director
Alfred Hitchcock
Critics invoke Hitchcock by name, and compare Drop to 2 of Hitchcock’s films.
Visuals
On Hitchcock, rather than any one film
It feels like a Hitchcockian fever dream filtered through a modern day lens.
If its goal is to emulate a heightened Alfred Hitchcock type mystery…
I was just impressed by how much more of a Hitchcock vibe it offers.
…an old-school Hitchcockian thriller…
…unleash a Hitchcockian countdown thriller swapping “The Bomb Under the Table” trope…
…a grittier modern tech ode to the high-concept “Hitchcock-ian” suspense drama…
The single setting is reminiscent of Rear Window not just with the fact that it takes place in one location, but how director Christopher Landon is able to shoot it in such a way that it never comes across like a stage play or feels unalive and non- cinematic despite never moving to multiple locations.
While Drop is clearly a pseudo-Rear Window update, it feels like it could've well been a Hasbro game adaptation…
…or Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound photographer playing cat & mouse so cleverly with the killer across the courtyard in REAR WINDOW?
…for that matter Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder…
Landon’s newest film has the energy of Wes Craven’s Red Eye…
It’s a fairly straightforward mystery thriller with occasional bits of visual flare and humor that harken back to Wes Craven’s Red Eye or even Scream.
Phone Book (a not-beloved movie by critics that this one nonetheless digs) and Red Eye immediately came to mind.
In 2005, it made sense to release a movie like Red Eye in theaters.
…the film Drop shares the most DNA with is Wes Craven’s superb 2005 thriller Red Eye, in which Cillian Murphy flirts with Rachel McAdams at an airport bar, then ends up seated next to her on their flight…
Not since the high-flying blackmail of Wes Craven’s “Red Eye” has a movie embraced its unlikely premise with such conviction.
It’s a fairly straightforward mystery thriller with occasional bits of visual flare and humor that harken back to Wes Craven’s Red Eye or even Scream.
…be it Scream inspiring millions to invest in CallerID…
In a classic Scream-sense… everybody is a suspect!
…think Scream’s Sidney Prescott advocating for abused women over a helpline…
…director Christopher Landon‘s exit from the “Scream” franchise…
…as we've seen it before in films like "Nick of Time," "Phone Booth," and others, but it's one that can yield intriguing results if used well, even in a single location, as demonstrated in the latter of the aforementioned examples…
…the type of unseen assailant threat familiar from films like Phone Booth, Grand Piano and the more recent Carry On…
…unlike Jaume Collet-Serra’s Carry-On or Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth, whose blueprint Drop wraps itself in like warm blanket…
It’s a premise that invites comparisons to thrillers like “Phone Booth” or “Red Eye,”…
Inspired equally by Wes Craven’s strangers-on-an-airplane thriller Red Eye, Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth, and all the many “Die Hard but on an X” movies that flooded theatres in the late nineties…
Remember past popcorn escapes like Joel Schumacher’s 2003 “Phone Booth,” featuring Colin Farrell entrapped by a sniper in one of the last movies of its kind before cell phones truly became the universal norm.
…may call to mind a different recent thriller, that of Carry-On (the 2024 Netflix hit)…
And while it is here, too, that Landon finds himself borrowing from other playhouses (some tricks will look very familiar to those who recently watched “Non-Stop” director Jaume Collet-Serra’s most recent film “Carry-On”)…
…unlike Jaume Collet-Serra’s Carry-On or Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth, whose blueprint Drop wraps itself in like warm blanket…
With the streaming success of Carry-On when seeing what the plot of Drop was, I couldn’t help but think “Carry-On but in a restaurant”.
Along with director Jaume Collet-Serra’s recent Netflix movie Carry-On — in which TSA airport agent Taron Egerton’s every word and action is monitored by a fixer forcing him to commit an act that would leave hundreds dead — Drop is another entry in a subgenre of innocent people under surveillance via security cameras and cellphones being puppeted to commit heinous acts.
It’s an oft-used plot device, recently in the Netflix action-thriller Carry-On, but it’s one that works.
Landon also creates what might be one of the best contemporary “texting” movies since Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2014 thriller Non-Stop…
Of course, this would be ignoring the fact that “Drop” is, in premise, not all that dissimilar to an entirely different confined thriller made over a decade ago—switch its high-rise restaurant setting for an airplane, its AirDrop gimmick for a few simple anonymous texts, and its petrified blonde for a glum brunette by the name of Liam Neeson, and you could call the film “Non-Stop.”
There’s an efficiency to the storytelling that recalls the inescapable momentum of Red Eye or Non-Stop, other films that featured protagonists trapped in one place facing challenging decisions.
Chris Roach (Non-Stop)…
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…the story takes a brief turn into DIE HARD-style chaos…
Remember when everything was “Die Hard on a _____”?
…all the many “Die Hard but on an X” movies that flooded theatres in the late nineties…
It’s cleverly cruel and adds a modern twist to the classic genre, like a strange love child of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Nick of Time.
…as we've seen it before in films like "Nick of Time," "Phone Booth," and others…
It feels like the unofficial sequel to “The Invisible Man” (2020) and a hard stance against abusers, especially in domestic violence cases.
Almost like it’s hitting very similar themes from Whannel’s The Invisible Man.
It’s an appetizer in a buffet of appetizers, like Night Swim (2023), Speak No Evil (2024), and Wolf Man (2025)…
Director
M. Night Shyamalan
Critics invoke Shyamalan by name, and compare Drop to 1 of Shyamalan’s films.
On Shyamalan, rather than any one film
…subverting these expectations is more innovative than some Shyamalan twist…
Drop’s tight structure and compounding twists are reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan, with the major difference being that Shyamalan would never get as snarky as Landon does in the first act.
…might bring to mind M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, another thriller that married a high concept with grounding in a specific location…
That’s the key to Drop: you have to suspend belief often, like Trap, and just turn your brain off to enjoy it.
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…you should immediately watch F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans,” a 1927 tear-jerker about another killer date where where the on-screen text “Couldn’t she get drowned?” sinks into a murky lake…
I felt a brief essence of Panic Room but it’s certainly not as strong as that timeless Fincher/Foster effort…