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Drop (2025)
It’s a bad sign when you forget seeing a movie mere weeks later, and thus is my state with the contained thriller Drop, a movie that never seems to take full advantage of its modern drawing room mystery-thriller premise. Director Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day) finds all manner of visual artifice to make the best of this story of one woman’s worst fears re-entering the dating scene. Violet (Meghann Fahy) attends a first date in one of those high-rise skyscraper restaurants, and during the date she’s harassed digitally by an unseen stalker who is sending hostile text messages and increasingly intense demands. Who in the restaurant could be the culprit, and why? Also, can she salvage this first date with this cute guy becoming more alarmed as the night progresses? The fun of the scenario rests in how our protagonist can keep ahead of the suspicion of her date while also trying to stay ahead of the suspicions of her antagonist as she deduces who in the restaurant might be her creep. It’s entertaining enough but the problem lies in the escalation of demands from the antagonist, including murder, and the movie doesn’t have the interest or stomach to go wilder or more extreme. As a result, Drop feels like an under-developed nosy neighbor movie, trying to suss out details with an informal investigation that never really takes off. Landon does his best to jazz up the proceedings with very intrusive visual designs of the ominous texts and messages, filling the screen with literal threats. It reminded me of 2014’s Non-Stop where Liam Neeson was on an airplane and being harassed by an unknown caller who plots to take down the plane. That premise had elevated stakes because of its location and urgency. This movie is about a woman on a date. You can see there’s a bit of a difference in their execution and aims. I can’t work up too many negative criticisms about Drop because it sets out to achieve what it promised, it’s just by the time we get into the third act action heroics away from that central setting, you may be checking your phone too, having already checked out.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Happy Death Day 2U (2019)
On one hand I can admire the “who gives a damn?” ethic behind the sequel to Happy Death Day, a fun time loop of slasher cinema tropes. The original had some darkly comic edges but mostly played its premise straight in the realm of horror. The sequel doesn’t play anything straight. It’s completely bonkers and looking to turn anything into a joke. This provides a charming carefree sense of bravado; however, if you were a fan of the first film, it also might rub you the wrong way and seem overly flippant and messy. We get a science fiction explanation involving parallel universes as to why the time loops are happening, and now our heroine Tree (Jessica Rothe) is stuck in a parallel version of her looped day. The film sidesteps a Back to the Future 2 sense of repetition but doesn’t stray too far from the outlines of the original Happy Death Day, just with a few new surprises. The big question is whether Tree will return to her home dimension or stay as a tourist in this new dimension, a world where her mother is still alive but her boyfriend is with somebody else. As should be obvious, this hard choice isn’t really that hard considering that she could always still get with the would-be boyfriend again. There are some comedic sequences that borderline on farcical sitcom, like a montage of suicide set to Paramore’s “Hard Times” and a woman faking being a bumbling blind student, and too many of the plot complications feel artificial and random, especially the delays to return to the home dimension. The world can often feel constrained as well, like this bustling campus only comprises the same eight faces (and their bushy eyebrows). My biggest gripe is that the first act is completely superfluous and it presented a more compelling mystery, a student from a future trying to kill their past self to avert a crisis. That’s way more interesting than another dopey killer in the baby mask. Still, the movie never pretends to be anything other than a fun couple of hours with sprightly visual comedy and a terrific anchor in Rothe, a comic stalwart. Happy Death Day 2U gets more ridiculous as it goes and I hope it just keeps digging further, never finding its bottom.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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