Drop is a 2025 mystery thriller directed by Christopher Landon, written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, and produced by Michael Bay and Brad Fuller's Platinum Dunes alongside Jason Blum's Blumhouse. It runs 95 minutes, was made for eleven million dollars, and took a little under twenty-nine million worldwide. Meghann Fahy plays Violet, a widowed single mother on her first date in years, with Brandon Sklenar as Henry, her date, Reed Diamond as Richard, a fellow diner, and Violett Beane as Violet's sister Jen. Almost the entire film takes place inside Palate, an upscale restaurant at the top of a Chicago high-rise. I was bored by it almost immediately and I never recovered.

The setup is that Violet begins receiving anonymous messages dropped to her phone during dinner. Do exactly as instructed, tell nobody, or the masked man currently inside her home will kill her young son and her sister. The final instruction is to kill Henry.

Let me start with what should have been the film's strength, because I genuinely love this format. Limited-set films can be some of the best things you will ever watch. The Menu is the obvious recent example: one location, one dinner service, and a superb piece of filmmaking. Confine a story properly and everything intensifies. When it works, nothing beats it.

This did not work. It was simply there, doing its thing, for ninety-five minutes.

The central gimmick is the problem. The drops never accumulate into tension, they accumulate into admin. Another message arrives, she reads it, she looks around the room, repeat. And rather than gripping me, it left me sitting there composing my own responses, because my honest reaction to being anonymously harassed by a stranger in a restaurant would have been to escalate aggressively and immediately until the other party gave up and went home. A thriller has lost you when you are busy solving it differently and more entertainingly in your own head.

The twist is that the sender is Richard, seated a few tables away, and Violet catches him by offering him the poisoned tequila shot. He declines, using her name, and she notes that she never told him her name. That is a genuinely good beat and I will happily credit it. Reed Diamond's shift from harmless to cold is well played. His employers, we learn, want Henry dead because Henry is an FBI informant preparing to testify about the corrupt mayor, who is duly arrested by the end.

Everything else, I saw arriving from a distance. The identity of the antagonist, the poisoning, the shape of the resolution. At no point was I surprised or impressed.