Drop has a simple hook: What if you were on the worst first date imaginable? This is the dilemma faced by Violet (Meghann Fahy), a single mom and trauma therapist who takes her connection with handsome press photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar) from the apps to IRL. The duo meets up at a Chicago fine dining restaurant, where their problems initially seem limited to wine choices and improv-happy waiters. Then Violet starts getting ominous messages airdropped to her phone. Her son is being held hostage and he’ll be killed unless she does exactly as she’s instructed: First, steal the SD card from Henry’s camera, then figure out a way to murder him.
It’s a Hitchcockian whodunnit by way of Jaume Collet-Serra’s single-location blackmail actioners (Non-Stop, The Commuter, and last year’s Carry-On). But there’s another influence in the mix too: Wes Craven’s underrated 2005 airplane thriller, Red Eye, in which Cillian Murphy terrorizes Rachel McAdams across an overnight flight from Dallas to Miami. Like Drop, Red Eye also throws a little romance into the mix; the opening act basically plays like a rom-com until Murphy reveals his terrifying true colors. (Something the marketing campaign hilariously leaned into.) And like Drop, Red Eye also celebrates the tenacity of an unassuming female protagonist who manages to outthink—and outfight—an opponent who’s operating 12 steps ahead of her.
The similarities aren’t coincidental. Drop director Christopher Landon is a longtime Craven fan who was originally supposed to carry on the late director’s legacy by helming Scream 7 until he left that project in late 2023, calling it “a dream job that turned into a nightmare.” He buried himself in refining a thriller script written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach instead. “I think for a lot of filmmakers, every project that we tackle is a reaction to the thing we did before,” Landon told Bloody Disgusting at Drop’s SXSW premiere. “I was reacting to a movie that I didn’t even make but was supposed to. It was the best version of kismet where I had this project. It really was a great sandbox for me to work out a lot because I’m always kind of wrestling and dealing with my stuff.”
Instead of working in Craven’s teen-centric world, Landon channeled perhaps the horror master’s most grown-up work. As Landon put it, “We live in an age where we’re dealing with a lot of movies that have these enormous production budgets and so many visual effects, and all this stuff that’s getting thrown at the audience. For me, sometimes there’s just something impossibly magical and enthralling about two people just at a table. The stakes can still be so high, even though your environment and the amount of characters you’re interacting with is so minimal.”
Indeed, maybe the biggest difference between Drop and Red Eye is the cinematic landscapes into which they’re being released. Back in 2005, theaters were filled with financially successful mid-budget films made for various adult tastes—from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Pride & Prejudice to Four Brothers to two more McAdams hits, Wedding Crashers and The Family Stone. Red Eye made $96 million on a $26 million budget and just a month later, Jodie Foster’s Flightplan took home $223 million on a $55 million budget. In the mid-aughts, there was room for not one but two airplane-set psychological thrillers! Now it feels like a miracle that Drop is even getting a theatrical release in a world where these kinds of movies often go straight to streaming, if they’re even made at all.
That’s thanks to Blumhouse, which specializes in producing horror flicks on the cheap (Drop cost just $11 million) and banking on audiences turning out to see them. Despite how it’s being marketed, however, Drop is less of a horror film and more of a true thriller. Much of its tension comes from watching Violet try to maintain a flirty sense of normalcy as her world implodes inside her phone. She has to keep Henry on the date, delay his murder, keep her son alive, and figure out who in the restaurant is sending her the messages. (The specifics of the film’s “digiDROP” technology means the sender has to be within 50 feet of her.)
In Red Eye, meanwhile, McAdams’ hotel manager Lisa Reisert has the opposite problem. After meeting cute at the airport bar, her suave, hilariously named seatmate Jackson Rippner (Murphy) reveals he’s actually a domestic terrorist with an assassination plan that requires her to switch the rooms of a Homeland Security head honcho staying at her hotel. If she refuses, Jackson will kill her father (Brian Cox, in a rare nice dad role). While Violet keeps scanning the restaurant to figure out who her taunter is and how he’s digitally spying on her every move, Lisa knows exactly who her adversary is—she’s literally sharing an arm rest with him.
That leads to different but equally compelling performances from McAdams and Fahy, who are both major talents of their generations. (Fahy’s breakout came in the second season of The White Lotus, but, like McAdams, she started by proving her girl culture bona fides; she was the best thing about Freeform’s young adult series The Bold Type.) In Drop, Violet has to keep her panic hidden while maintaining a sense of intimacy with Henry. In Red Eye, Lisa has to ensure the terror she feels around Jackson doesn’t become noticeable to anyone else on the flight. They’re both depictions of the kind of emotional-gymnastics-as-safety-precautions that a lot of women can relate to, even if they haven’t been held hostage by psychopaths.
That also leads to very different performances from the male leads as well. While both films give their heroines backstories of abuse, Red Eye depicts coercive control in action. Murphy is truly terrifying in Red Eye, channeling his blue-eyed intensity into a taut thread of anger that threatens to snap at a moment’s notice. Sklenar, meanwhile, is carving out a niche for himself as the gentle, salt-of-the-earth support system for mistreated women. He delivered a similar mix of warmth and strength in last year’s It Ends With Us (another win for mid-budget filmmaking before it somehow became the most controversial production in Hollywood).
Still, Drop and Red Eye are female-driven films first, and McAdams and Fahy both excel at projecting a sense of competence and intelligence that makes them fantastic thriller protagonists. Where John McClane had the freedom to run around shooting terrorists in Die Hard, Violet and Lisa are stuck in a single seat and have to rely on their brains to figure out how to best their opponents. Both women try a bunch of clever tactics that hit that “this is what I would do” viewing sweet spot, from sussing out potential allies to scribbling notes asking for help. Violet gets some fun business with a watch and some limes; Lisa has a great moment where she tries to fake a call when the phoneline goes out and later makes particularly memorable use of a pen.
But Drop’s other main asset is its lavish production design. While Red Eye commits to admirable verisimilitude around just how cramped coach is, Drop renders the fictional fine-dining restaurant Palate as a sort of amber-hued maze with all sorts of circular nooks Violet can duck into. Landon’s camera takes us through a tour of the space, then lets Violet play detective as she scopes out fellow diners and discovers new quirks of the layout she can use to her advantage. It’s an elegant backdrop that elevates the dumb fun of the plot.
Red Eye is the better paced film, though. It has the cat-and-mouse tension of hostage and captor being crammed into the same airplane row, while Drop feels like it’s just killing time with Violet’s repetitively thwarted attempts to get help. Her digital foe seems a little too overpowered when it comes to tracking her every movement, which is somehow less scary than Murphy just staring down McAdams. And while both films make a somewhat jarring shift towards more conventional action in their third acts, Red Eye does a better job tying its slasher sequence in thematically. Earlier, Jackson scoffs that women act on emotion, while men act on “fact-based logic.” In the end, however, he’s the one who devolves into an emotionally unhinged mess when things don’t go according to his plan.
Both films, though, deliver that deep sense of satisfaction derived from watching an everyday female protagonist face impossible odds and manage to save herself, all in under 100 minutes. Both Violet and Lisa reveal that they froze during a past moment of trauma. Now they get the opportunity to make a different choice. And they succeed because their opponents underestimate how smart, resourceful, and driven they are. McAdams and Fahy get to deliver the sort of kiss-off lines usually reserved for Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger or sometimes Halle Berry, who’s carving out her own brand of movies like this with The Call and Kidnap. It makes Drop and Red Eye casually feminist without feeling the need to be too self-congratulatory about it. They heighten women’s real-life fears into something knowingly goofy but still emotionally relatable, all while having enough fun with their filmmaking that seeing them in a crowded theater is especially entertaining.
