Techno-thriller ‘Drop’ falls short of Hitchcockian aspirations
A scene from the film “Drop.” Image: Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures
Blumhouse Productions, the studio that horror built, is on a slump as of late, as it continues to prioritize sequels, prequels, and remakes. “Drop,” the techno-thriller from director Christopher Landon, is a welcome shift from the usual Blumhouse production. Landon worked on some of the studio’s most successful franchises, but his latest film refrains from the supernatural and delves into the familiar—smartphones.
One of the director’s earliest film projects is “Disturbia,” where he served as screenwriter of an updated version of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” I was reminded of that piece of millennial lore while I watched “Drop,” because his latest film revels in the Hitchcock-ness of it all—the tensions, the close-ups, and of course, the blondes.
The film opens with a terrified woman and her son in the middle of a domestic dispute with her disturbed and armed husband. It cuts to the present, and we meet the same woman (a therapist named Violet), more composed but still nervous. Despite the multiple cameras installed inside her home, she is still apprehensive about leaving her son with her sister. But a date is a date, and it’s her first since that traumatic incident. She heads to Palate, a posh restaurant nestled inside a modern high-rise. Except for an unidentified number that keeps airdropping (hence the title) memes to her phone, it’s been a terrific first date. That is, until the memes turned into threats, and the night could end with a dead date or a dead son.
Hitchcock, the, uh, generous man that he is, used films to provide the audience a place to project their fears. Except, he also once quipped, “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.”
Though “Drop” is not potent enough to force people to switch to Android, it’s a decent but uneven thriller with bigger Hitchcockian aspirations. Compared to the recent Blumhouse releases, there is a discernible effort put into “Drop.” What it falls short, though, is in interesting characters—a misstep for a film with Hitchcockian ambitions.
The master of macabre is an intentional filmmaker who uses all the resources with precision. But at the core of his film is a set of interesting characters—not heroic nor relatable characters, but interesting. The precise moment I lost interest in “Drop” was at the part where the villain and his intentions were revealed. A few weeks ago, I saw a Hitchcock film for the first time called “The Trouble with Harry.” Though I wasn’t its biggest fan, I still thought it was a gorgeous-looking black comedy. But it’s the endearing cast of oddball characters that held my attention throughout the film.
One thing that kept me wondering long after I saw the film is how Hitchcock films smartphones. In “Drop,” the filmmakers opted to either show the phone screen or resort to floating texts — both don’t look, for lack of a better term, cinematic. It reminds me of an online discourse on how landlines look better onscreen than smartphones. Sending threats through text messaging, much less airdropping, doesn’t hold a candle to screaming at a handset and slamming it onto the switch hook. Hitchcock once lamented how most films end up as “photographs of people talking.” He added he tries to make it cinematic, “through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.” Hitchcock would have hated smartphones.
