It is strangely comforting that a movie can still mark M when you want.
Smart phones have been largely renewed for horror movies, which leads to the filmmakers to find all kinds of reasons, dead batteries, without service, to detect possible dams. But at least since the “forgiveness, the incorrect number” of 1949, the phones have also been a reliable duct for terror capable of reaching the house or pocket. “Drop”, a new but suspense thriller, continues with the tradition of “when a stranger calls” and “telephone cabin” by placing its tension around mysterious and threatening phone messages.
Violet ( Meghann Fahy ), A widow with a small child is on her first date in years. After three months of text messages, he has finally agreed to meet Henry (Brandon Sklenar) for dinner. When they sit in an elegant restaurant at the top of an elegant height in Chicago, he is lovely and relaxed. But Violet, as innumerable dates before her, cannot remain out of her phone.
However, in the case of Violet, the distraction is legitimate. She continues to receive messages to her phone threatening her son, who is at home with Violet’s sister (Violett Beane), unless he does what he says, even killing his appointment. At home, security cameras can see a man with a covered face swimming a gun.
“Drop”, directed by Christopher Landon (“Happy Death Day”), does not differ much from the great strip of the high concept and low -budget thrillers that regularly flood the theaters. But it is a small tense movie, almost totally set in the restaurant, with a sufficiently acute sensation of plausible and absurd. He knows how to move the plot of cooking with pressure, however, not overcoming his welcome. To ingenious 95 minutes, “Drop” knows when to hang.
As if adding a digital turn to the old line “The call comes from inside the house,” Violet is receiving a message called Digidrop that can only be sent from a person inside the 50 feet. That means that everyone in the restaurant, the brother who runs into her, the cheesy waiter, the kind cantinero, is suspicious. With her terrorizer looking at her every movement and prohibiting breathing a word to anyone, Violet is trapped in rooted in her table when each fiber of her being wants to rescue her son.
A considerable help for the film are Fahy’s founded screen presences (“The White Lotus”) and Sklenar (“1923”), both small screen shoots that show the balance of movie stars here. As the plot will join, naturally, there are objections that one could do. A mother, with a masked gun man outside the door of her little child, could pretend interest in a duck salad? Did the highly orchestrated trap place for its coincidence the reasons for the criminal intellectual author? And as long as we ask questions, couldn’t we one day get a telephone number thriller entitled “Butt dial”?
But if “fall” is invariably much less than realistic, it has a smell of metaphor. Violet not only returns to the dating pool as a single mother, he is trying to shake the past trauma of the conjugal abuse. Going to an appointment with Henry, whom you met in an application, is a kind of garbage outbreak. Will going out with a stranger online will end in love or violence?
“Drop” could also read as an extreme version of a more ubiquitous scourge. This is a movie where the bad boy, for almost the duration of the movie, is nothing more than text messages. (In general, they are large on the screen. How much of the terror of “fall” would have existed at all, if I had put it silent?
“Drop”, the launch of Universal Pictures is classified PG-13 by the Motion Picture Film Association for strong violent content, suicide, some sexual references and strong languages. Execution time: 95 minutes. Two and a half stars of four.
