It’s probably because I’m not 25 anymore but I honestly don’t understand the trend to share photos with complete strangers. At least on Facebook and Instagram, you supposedly know all the people who are your friends, yet that’s what Apple’s AirDrop allows you to do. I’m an Android guy and if my phone has that feature, I’m thankfully not aware of it but in case you don’t know how AirDrop works, there’s a setting on it that allows you to share photos and text messages with anyone who is within a certain distance from you. Why you would want this setting turned on other than to share photos of your intimate body parts with complete strangers is way beyond my level of comprehension. That feature, however, is the focal point for the new film, DROP, by director Christopher Landon (the HAPPY DEATH DAY films).

Violet (Meghann Fahy, TV’s THE WHITE LOTUS) is an abuse therapist and a widowed mother to five-year-old Toby. She clearly does well at her career judging from the size of her house. Violet is an abuse survivor herself, as we also learn in a flashback. Her late husband used to beat her and threaten her and baby Toby with a gun. But hubby is now out of the picture and Violet is ready to ride that horse again. She’s about to go on her first date in years with Henry (Brandon Sklenar, IT ENDS WITH US), a photographer she met on a dating app. They arrange to meet at Palate, a “Fine Dining Restaurant” (as if a fine dining restaurant needs to tell people that), located on the top floor of a downtown Chicago skyscraper. As it’s her first time leaving Toby alone, granted he’ll be with her seemingly responsible sister, Jen (Violett Beane, TV’s THE FLASH), she’s got all the nanny cams in the house turned on so she can watch the goings on from her phone. However, as her AirDrop (or whatever it’s called in the movie) is turned on so that anyone within 50 feet can message her, someone in the restaurant very quickly starts sending her threatening messages telling her that if she doesn’t kill Henry, someone will kill Toby.

There is so much that’s just silly with this story, the least of which is that Violet and Henry go to a fancy restaurant on a first date. Whatever happened to meeting in a bar for drinks or at a coffee shop for a double latte? Clearly, someone wants Henry dead so why involve Violet? It’s explained at the film’s climax that the mystery person wanted to deflect suspicion onto someone else but Violet has a pretty good alibi. She only met Henry that night and all her text messages on the dating app are on the up-and-up. Henry asked her out, not the other way around. She has no motive to kill him whereas, with a tiny bit of detective work, it would become evident that someone else does. Then there are all the threatening messages on her phone. Oh sure, they are untraceable, at least that’s what we’re told, but they’re still on her phone. It’s solid evidence that she was acting under duress. But here’s the biggest curiosity: Why didn’t she just turn off her AirDrop “Everyone” setting when she got her first message from the mystery person? Her sister is in her contacts list. She still could have communicated with Violet, or here’s a thought: Why not turn it off altogether and tell Jen to switch to WhatsApp or Signal? If Signal is good enough to text secret war plans, it should be good enough to send photos of Toby eating chocolate pudding. But, of course, if Violet had done that, we wouldn’t have a movie.

We can back it up even further. How would the mystery person even know that Violet would have her AirDrop set to “Everyone” or that the date would last longer than five minutes? It seems the mystery person made a lot of assumptions and took a lot of unnecessary risks. If killing Henry is as time sensitive as we are told, then just go hire a hitman to bump him off in the building’s underground parking lot and be done with it.

Although the story is completely DAF, I’ll give Fahy and Sklenar full marks for selling it to audiences. They’ve got good chemistry together and wow, they work hard to make the most inane lines of dialogue seem almost plausible… almost. Writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach (FANTASY ISLAND) try to throw a curveball into the story by having every man of her age at the restaurant wearing a beard, and that includes Henry. This, of course, could be Violet’s imagination as her late husband was also hirsute and the sight of so many bearded men in one place would probably trigger an emotional response in Violet. Unfortunately, this possibility is never developed beyond her general fear that one of them is the mystery person. Nevertheless, if you know your TV actors, you can pretty much guess who the mystery person is fairly quickly. That’s called poor casting.

DROP opens in Hong Kong tomorrow (April 10th). Despite the numerous positive reviews it received when it premiered at SXSW a few weeks ago, I think it’s rubbish. Pretty rubbish but still rubbish.

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