Drop (Christopher Landon, 2025)
Christopher Landon hasn't reached the level of fame and name recognition as someone like Jordan Peele, but his bonafides in the horror genre are impressive. Landon came on as writer of Paranormal Activity 2 when the series creator, Oren Peli, decided he wasn't interested in doing anything but producing a sequel. Landon was responsible for or involved with shaping the series from that point forward, including introducing some of the most interesting parts of the overall series lore and mythology. Whatever one may feel about the series, it pulled in $890 million, and without Paranormal Activity, Blumhouse Productions doesn't develop its place in today's horror landscape, and some of the exciting voices in the genre don't get their first shot.
Landon would go on to write and direct Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2u, one of the rare instances of a film franchise whose entries are different genres, and one that has a loyal following clamoring for a third entry. His control of tone, ability to mix comfortably genre elements and energetic visual style are on display in both films. It quickly becomes clear why he was a good fit to direct Drop.
In 2025, he picked up a co-writing credit on the slasher hit, Heart Eyes, and delivered Drop to theaters, taking on directing responsibilities for a script co-written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach. After her breakout performance in season one of The White Lotus, Megan Fahy takes the lead role as Violet, a woman on one of film history's worst first dates. The supporting cast includes Brandon Sklenar, Violet Bean and Reed Diamond.
Drop owes a debt to the single location thrillers of the nineties like Panic Room, Red Eye and Air Force One. Jacobs and Roach give it a familiar feeling, while also tapping into modern anxieties about the ever watchful eye of surveillance cameras and that our phones can demand our time and attention constantly. It's Megan Fahy's film, and she carries it handily. Her most prominent co-star is off screen and communicating via her cell phone through the majority of the runtime. Sklenar, who plays her date and is the person on screen with her most, acquits himself commendably, playing a likable, sensitive guy, excited to be on a date with her, increasingly confused by how distracted she is, but compassionate throughout.
Fahy's performance, along with Landon's control of tone and good pacing in the script and editing help keep the film fun, and moving at a brisk pace, despite its single location. Maybe the most impressive thing about Drop is that on paper, it really shouldn't work. The amount of information and communication happening via cell phone, should make it boring, but Landon develops a visual language which integrates the text communication, Fahy's character's mental and emotional reactions, while keeping things visually interesting. It serves as both the performance opposite Fahy's Violet, and an extension of her character. Drop fails without a director who can bring that kind of visual imagination to it and a cinematographer (Marc Spicer) who can help execute it.
It's not heady or heavy, and it delivers the kind of thrills that are easy to let live in the films run time and reality, and aren't going to follow the audience into their nightmares or the bristling anxiety that many horror films can help engender when walking through your darkened home in the middle of the night. Whether it's a third Happy Death Day film or something else, I'll be looking forward to what Christopher Landon does next.