Drop – Dir: Christopher Landon (13th Floor Film review)
Drop picks you up and carries you along for the ride dragging your reservations about all those yawning plot holes behind you.
Starring: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson
Megan Fahey, instantly recognisable to fans of The White Lotus and Brandon Sklenar, instantly recognisable as “that cute guy from that thing’* play Violet and Henry, who are embarking upon their long delayed first date.
Leaving her (obviously) adorable bespectacled offspring in the care of her sister, Violet is braving her first romantic excursion since the premature death of her spouse under undisclosed circumstances.
The upmarket restaurant setting plays like an extra character with its jaw dropping views of the Chicago skyline, made even more impressive once you know that the entire restaurant interior was built from the ground up and filmed on a giant sound stage in Dublin, Ireland.
Having established early on that Henry is clearly the most patient man on the planet (he has been waiting for this date for three months) and that he has cracking taste in restaurants, Drop proceeds to test that poor man in ways that would cause the most determined of suitors to activate ghost mode.
Of all the questionable plot twists, it is the never-ending niceness of poor perpetually abandoned Henry that most stretches the viewer’s credibility. Landed with a date who spends more time away from the table than she does at it, that man is determined to outlast some kind of bad date endurance test.
Fahey is obviously gorgeous but by about halfway through the evening, any other man would be catapulting her straight into the “no go” zone of the hot/crazy scale**.
Btw if you are someone who gets anxious about people’s food getting cold in restaurants you are going to be on the edge of your seat with this one.
To give away the reason for Violet’s constant disappearing acts would be to spoil the fun, but if you can suspend disbelief, and not get too hung up on logistics, you will have a very enjoyable time at this one.
Although the premise of the film could be described as Hitchcockian, that would be a tad on the generous side.
However, the writing team of Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, also responsible for Fantasy Island and Truth or Dare have concocted a script that is tighter than a duck’s derriere and the 95-minute runtime gallops past like a racehorse on nose beers.
Word to the wise, skip the trailer, which reveals so much of the plot that the comments section is rife with sentiments like “well, I guess I don’t need to go see that now” and take a leap of faith with this one.
That leap will be well rewarded, Drop is right up there with Novocaine as the most fun you can have with your clothes on this April.
Jo Barry
Drop opens in cinemas Thursday, April 17th. Click here for tickets and showtimes.
* Before anyone comes for me, I do know that he is in 1923…well, now I do.
** This is a thing – you can google it
