Existential anxiety? There’s an app for that.

A first date in 2025 is already a gauntlet of microaggressions, QR code menus, and existential dread disguised as curated spontaneity. Drop takes that anxious energy and weaponises it, serving up a scenario where even the most mundane digital encounter can spiral into a full-blown psychological siege. What starts with a meme – silly, viral, vaguely inappropriate – becomes a sharp jab at the fragile social rituals of modern romance. It’s tech horror with a wry smirk, and the smirk only deepens as things start to go very, very wrong.

A well-placed spotlight can make even a soufflé seem sinister. It can also take a trendy rooftop restaurant and slowly dial the tension until the lighting itself feels like a threat. Drop understands this, and Christopher Landon uses that understanding to thread theatrical unease through a deliciously contemporary cautionary tale about dating, digital footprints, and the quiet horror of letting someone in.

Meghann Fahy’s Violet, alone at a perfectly Instagrammable venue, isn’t just a character on a first date – she’s centre stage, lit and exposed like a performer in a Beckett monologue. Her would-be Romeo, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), is all curated charm and artful ambiguity. They play to each other and the imagined audience around them, until a rogue AirDrop – a meme, grinning and harmless – yanks them into a different kind of performance. One where the script keeps changing and the audience isn’t so imaginary after all.

Landon’s decision to keep almost the entire film within the restaurant pays off in spades. It becomes a pressure cooker masquerading as a wine bar, with the kind of spotlighting, blocking, and spatial choreography that wouldn’t feel out of place in a West End thriller. Every clink of cutlery or shift in tone is a cue; every character, even the background diners, reads like an actor hitting their mark. There’s a delicious theatricality in how it all unfolds, especially as the digital drops evolve from meme-stuffed mischief to deeply personal psychological warfare. It’s staging that knows how to unsettle without ever raising its voice.

Fahy navigates it all with brittle, compelling precision. Violet may be recovering from trauma, but she’s no shrinking ingenue. Sklenar, meanwhile, walks the line between earnest and eerie with the kind of balance that keeps things tense even before the first drop hits. The film keeps its cast lean and tight, a supporting ensemble who react and recede like chorus members, until the final act is forced to rely on a child performer who unfortunately plays more like understudy than breakout.

And that final act – well, it’s a bit like finishing a three course Michelin-starred dinner with a cup of lukewarm Nescafe instant coffee. Once Drop exits the restaurant, it loses the stagecraft that elevated the already high concept as the climax collapses into a rote home invasion flurry, swapping out psychological gamesmanship for kitchen-drawer thrills and an improbably brief travel time from city centre restaurant to suburban kill zone. It’s not fatal, but it is fumbled, and it highlights just how strong the earlier film has been.

Still, there’s no denying Landon’s masterful control of the drama for most of the runtime. That same knack for taking outlandish conceits and grounding them in character-driven tension that powered Happy Death Day and Freaky is on fine form here. Drop feels like it could just as easily be mounted on stage as screen, and that theatrical elegance, combined with the razor-sharp awareness of the wide spectrum of modern anxieties, gives the whole affair a bite far nastier than its meme-loving opening would suggest. It’s a thriller that understands the performance of intimacy, and how sometimes the spotlight doesn’t just reveal – it accuses.