Everything We Saw at SXSW 2025 

And that’s another SXSW for the history books. At the same festival that saw a keynote talk given by the CEO trying to bring the Woolly Mammoth back, cinephiles and genre enthusiasts also got a new Babak Anvari banger, the unicorn horror-comedy you never knew you needed, and a reported return to form by Matthew […]

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Stakes naturally feel high on almost any first date. As much as it is an opportunity to meet or better acquaint yourself with someone, first dates can also be veritable leaps of faith. There is an air of mystery or suspense when you put yourself out there. And if you’ve ever had such a rendezvous at a restaurant, you know how much worse it is when catching strangers staring at the proceedings, eager to judge how the evening’s dinner and a show goes for the new potential couple.

Unfortunately for Violet and Henry (Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar), they have a truly enraptured audience during the brisk 100 minutes composing Drop, and this anonymous viewer is determined to dial in requests—which run the gamut from Violet being coerced to steal something out of Henry’s briefcase to, eventually, slipping a little poison into his drink.

That is the perfectly concise and sharpened hook at the center of Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s breezy script. The screenwriters, along with director Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day and Freaky), are out to build a high-concept worthy of an old Alfred Hitchcock thriller, albeit with the modern veneer of a 2020s Blumhouse production and the literal height of the film occurring at a skyline restaurant (so you just know someone is going out that window even before Violet confesses to a fear of heights).

One of the several appeals of Drop, then, is how it tweaks familiar formulas and tropes. Hitch himself once said that suspense “is the bomb underneath the table, and the public knows it [but the characters do not].” Yet in this movie, Violet is only too aware of the proverbial bomb, and she is being encouraged to detonate it or some anonymous watcher will have her son murdered (the stranger is “dropping” photos and hideous threats by way of internet memes to her phone).

The riff on Apple’s AirDrop, which in the film is simply suggested to be an alternative knockoff called “Digidrops,” is also clever. Some of the best thrillers and horror movies tap into the technological zeitgeist of their times, be it Scream inspiring millions to invest in CallerID or for that matter Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, and there is something surely disquieting about us finding ways to make it even easier for strangers to hide beneath a veil of anonymity while messaging our devices.

Not that Violet or Henry aren’t immediately creeped out when they discover someone is AirDropping her cryptic memes in the restaurant. One of the sharper elements of the script is that she doesn’t initially keep the messages to herself, and the pair muse what kind of weirdo would be sending “internet humor” to a woman at a date bar. Sudde