Drop

What’s more terrifying than a first date? Nothing, and that’s the joke at least partially embedded in “Drop.” Cursed with an exemplar middling thriller name, Violet Gates (Meghann Fahy) begins Christopher Landon’s premise-of-the-year picture by slipping on a dress, leaving her five-year-old son in the care of her sister, and going out for a blind date dinner at a restaurant housed inside a glittering skyscraper, pausing before she enters, the mood and the music making it seem like it’s the Spook Central building in “Ghostbusters.” Indeed, the marvelous set design turns the entrance to the chic dining room into a kind of tunnel, like one leading to a rollercoaster ride. Convenient, because that’s what Violet is essentially about to go on, and us too, as once she sits down with Henry (Brandon Sklenar) to peruse the menu and see if maybe this is a match, her phone lights up with threatening messages ordering her to kill Henry or else a man inside her home will kill her son. It’s a superb set-up, and Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s screenplay does a solid job continually re-stacking the deck and setting up a gallery of suspects, though Landon’s direction does not synch enough with Fahy’s crucially grounded performance to imbue a true sense of increasing emotional and mental claustrophobia and isolation given that she is almost exclusively locked into one locale and the killer dictates she can’t tell her date what’s going on.

That dictum, in fact, saddles Sklenar with a nigh impossible task, which is why I don’t want to be too harsh on his underwhelming turn, needing to seem a little suspicious but also a little charismatic and ingratiating but also a little bit like a pinball in a pinball machine getting bounced around by the game of life. In the end, Sklenar just winds up inert. Fahy has better chemistry with Gabrielle Ryan as the bartender who’s been around the block. The villain, alas, lacks real juice, and the ultimate confrontation between the villain and Violet is a letdown, ineptly staged and rushed, and probably rushed because it’s so ineptly staged. But then, “Drop” isn’t about the villain anyway. It’s about Violet confronting the lingering fear and trauma of domestic abuse, set up by the opening scene. That’s a weighty topic, a little too weighty, really, given where “Drop” ends up going. It’s not too weighty for Fahy, who imbues it in her performance, but as “Drop” increasingly untethers itself from reality, the more it creates an unworkable contradiction. The culminating twist seems ripped from the deliberately over-the-top “Commando,” but yields an incredulous cackle rather than a euphoric laugh. What’s worse, the last scene has a bad joke fake-out so mean-spirited given what Violet has gone through that, for a second, I swear, Fahy seems to step outside the character, saying “That’s not funny” to the writers more than her fellow actors. It might be the most piercing moment in the whole movie.