The latest from horror-comedy workhorse Christopher Landon, Drop sees the Happy Death Day and Freaky director stepping outside his usual slasher remix sandbox. This time he trades high concept stabbing for something slightly more conventional, a single-location, real-time thriller with old-school bones — Hitchcockian in construction but unabashedly from the iPhone era. While watching, my mind ran to Grand Piano, the 2013 gem about a piano player whose life depends on playing every note correctly. Like that film, Drop operates on a high-strung premise involving secret communication that’s just a few notches past plausible, but gets you to buy in and pulls it off, your heart rate rising in linear correlation with the progressing runtime.

(Last year’s Carry On scratched a similar itch, and multiple reviews have referenced Red Eye and Phone Booth, which I have not seen. I have decided I will add all films I can find in the “stuck in this dangerous room for 90 minutes” subgenre to my watchlist.)

We open with Violet Gates (Meghann Fahy), a Chicago therapist and single mother, finally dipping her toe back into the dating pool after the death of her abusive husband. She leaves her young son Toby at home with her sister Jen (Violett Beane) and heads to a swanky high-rise restaurant for a first date with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a charming photographer. But before Henry even arrives, Violet starts receiving “Digi-Drops” — messages and memes sent from an anonymous account via an app that resembles Apple’s “AirDrop” feature. The messages begin vaguely obnoxious and intrusive and gradually shift to straight-up threatening. What starts as a nuisance becomes a nightmare. They eventually force Violet to comply with increasingly sinister instructions under the watchful eye of the restaurant’s security system with her son’s life on the line.

The film has elements of a whodunit, but doesn’t really play by the mystery genre’s rules, to its benefit. The paranoia of a faceless threat is the point. Violet is constantly darting her eyes: to the bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), the overly friendly waiter (Jeffery Self), the couple bickering at the next table, the impatient patron waiting for his reservation, and even her date. Landon and DP Marc Spicer keep the camera gliding through the restaurant, reinforcing the sense that Violet is indeed always being watched by devices surrounding her. It’s a vicious weaponization of how our always-on world leaves no place for privacy or intimacy.

This is Landon’s best film since Happy Death Day, and frankly nearly as good as that. While Drop is less high-concept than the time loop slasher, it’s comparably precise in how it builds a novel premise into something with more heft than its elevator pitch. Like Happy Death Day, Drop uses its structure and constraints as scaffolding to deliver psychological heft and character development alongside the danger. It’s a major course correction from We Have a Ghost, which was a shapeless tonal slushie by comparison. (Perhaps that’s why Landon opted to direct a script written by someone else for the first time; a palate cleanser.)

Given that Violet is a therapist who’s clawed her way back from an abusive marriage, the film does a remarkably good job letting those traits inform the character’s behavior without turning her into a walking metaphor. This is no heavy-handed trauma allegory or therapy-talk genre exercise. When Violet starts to spiral, it’s all built on a well-sketched and -acted character development, but it isn’t strictly about Violet’s past traumas. It reminded me, again, of Hitchcock’s better work in the way it layers Violet’s psychology and demons into the suspense of the scenario without making a show of it.

That excellent construction wouldn’t land without the right performance at the front, and Meghann Fahy, best known for playing Theo James’s wife in White Lotus’s second season, is up to the challenge. It’s a not an easy role: she has to carry a film mostly by looking at phone screens and pretending she’s unbothered by what’s going on around her (while still clearly being bothered to the audience), and keeping that interesting for long stretches. She pulls it off with a variety of tones and expressive facial expressions. (Being ridiculously beautiful doesn’t hurt.) The rest of the cast sheet is mostly names I’m unfamiliar with, some TV actors and D-listers, but quite solid. Jeffery Self has a tough job as the comic relief of sorts, a caricature of obnoxious waiters the jars the film out of its tension, but he threads it pretty well. (He has an opening riff describing an improv act about a hat that had me laughing pretty hard at its stupidity.)

It’s not a flawless film or an all-time great. Despite the brisk runtime, the rhythm does fall into a bit of a loop towards the hour mark. There’s a pattern of Violet receiving a message, faking some restaurant-related mishap, regrouping, and doing it all again. It frays the tension only a smidge. Drop is a 95-minute movie that should’ve been 80 or 85. It also has enough plausibility issues and plot holes that it might distract some viewers, though I was along for the ride.

But for all that, Drop is still a triumph of a Swiss watch thriller. It modernizes the classic countdown danger template, a blend of old and new — Rope by way of Tinder and texting. It’s got a great hook but stays grounded, filled with genuinely clever uses of tight spaces and surveillance. When the movie is working — which it usually is — it’s a reminder of how nerve-shredding genre cinema can be. It is, as all thrillers ought be, suspenseful.

Podcast Episodes

• Happy Death Day 1 & 2U (Time Loop Month)

Chronological

• Happy Death Day (2017) (Very Good) (podcast episode)
• Happy Death Day 2U (2019) (Good) (podcast episode)
• Freaky (2020) (Good)
• We Have a Ghost (2023) (Not Very Good)
• Drop (2025) (Very Good)

By Rating

Very Good (6/8)

• Happy Death Day (2017)
• Drop (2025)

Good (5/8)

• Happy Death Day 2U (2019)
• Freaky (2020)

Not Very Good (3/8)

• We Have a Ghost (2023)

Not Seen / Not Rated

• Burning Palms (2010)
• Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)
• Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)

Last Updated

• 3/4/2026

Review Index

This Netflix original is based off of the short story “Ernest” by Geoff Manaugh. But we have no one to blame but Landon himself: He hand-picked the story and adapted the screenplay. To be fair, this film is clearly targeted at a broader family audience than any of his other recent films. But it still feels like Landon got a little carried away, trying to do much more of much less interesting storytelling than his better films.

The story follows the Presley family, who just moved to a new town. The family is upper-middle-class by most appearances, but the story repeatedly suggests that the parents, Frank (Anthony Mackie) and Melanie (Erica Ash), are a bit strapped for cash. Frank gets sucked into get-rich-quick schemes. They buy a fixer-upper at a discount, not realizing that its low asking price is because it’s known around town as “The Death House” and is haunted by a ghost.

The Presleys have barely moved in when teenage son Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) meets Ernest (David Harbour), the titular ghost. Ernest has a bad comb-over and a stained bowling jacket but is otherwise not especially intimidating. He doesn’t make noise or go out of his way to scare anyone. He’s friendlier than Casper.

The film doesn’t bother to linger on the question of whether Ernest is real or whether he’s dangerous. The entire Presley family accepts him immediately, although there’s one half-assed beat where the rest of the family tries to hide him from the mother

I was actually vibing with the movie in these early scenes. They have a pleasant, low-key texture. If Landon’s whole game is mixing horror with familiar stock plots and genres, why not a horror teen hang-out comedy?

Unfortunately, the story spins out of control after the first act and doesn’t quite recover until the very end of the movie. Frank, the dad, decides that his family’s ticket to quick wealth is turning Ernest into a media sensation. This leads to a big, unfunny satire on the sensationalism of both traditional and social media. It’s nothing you haven’t seen a thousand times before, and Landon doesn’t have any tricks up his sleeve to make this stretch more fun.

This is also where the movie decides to introduce its government conspiracy subplot: Tig Notaro plays a CIA agent responsible for investigating the paranormal, which adds an undercooked conspiracy thriller thread to an already busy film.

As if that wasn’t enough narrative jumble, the movie also starts exploring Ernest’s pre-death backstory in what becomes the movie’s central mystery. Thus, we have three incompatible arcs introduced the second act, and none of them are especially well-rendered. And so following We Have a Ghost’s gentle intro, the film rapidly becomes chaotic and unsatisfying.

This essentially manifests as a villain problem: All of Landon’s three previous movies had really distinct and intimidating baddies: the baby-mask stabber in the Happy Death Day movies and The Butcher in Freaky. We Have a Ghost, on the other hand, is juggling unremarkable antagonists left and right. Plus, there’s the lurking threat of a surprise villain in the third act as Ernest’s backstory gradually comes to light.

I was all ready to write off We Have a Ghost as a complete misfire, but the film crystallizes once again in its closing 15 minutes with a theme that had been tertiary to that point: fatherhood. There are a few really lovely, quiet scenes toward the end of the film that had tears running down my cheeks. The films emotionality sneaks up on you, but doesn’t feel entirely unearned. But I think it would’ve hit even harder if the film had been less about the commotion of the ghost and more about what he represents to Nathan throughout the whole film.

The film is also over two hours long, an absolutely outrageous runtime for a family horror-comedy adventure. In that vein, here’s my proposed rewrite of the film. Landon, you should’ve called me: Completely cut out the media hoopla subplot and the CIA subplot. You’d easily get the film a half hour shorter from that, probably more, and you could focus much more on the mystery of Ernest’s backstory and the way Ernest plays a proxy father figure to Kevin as Frank disconnects and obsesses over money.

I have not given up hope on Landon by a long shot, though. He stages a few terrific set pieces in this film and generally creates a strong sense of space, particularly in the haunted house the Presley’s move into. My favorite action scene of the movie involves Ernest flying through walls with a few corporeal human characters trying to keep up, stumbling through doors and over furniture. It’s a fun piece of slapstick.

At this point in his career, Landon’s biggest strength is obvious: He always gets terrific performances and chemistry out of his leads. We Have a Ghost is no exception. Winston is charismatic and funny as the sympathetic teen. I’d love to see him in some more movies. Mackie is high-strung and hysterical, locked in where other actors of his caliber might have treated the streaming gig as an easy paycheck. Harbour casts a figure both imposing and tender as the ghost, especially in the film’s second half.

Plenty of streaming releases have had major issues with special effects and CGI. We Have a Ghost’s CGI is mediocre, but not an outright disaster. (Compared to the similar Curse of Bridge Hollow, the CGI here belongs in the Louvre, though that one’s story is less busted.) The film’s two signature effects are 1) Ernest as a translucent, floating human and objects floating and moving. Both are effects that could have worked just as well with a green screen and wires. I guess it functions as a CGI monstrosity, but did it have to be so unappealing to look at? In fact, the overall cinematography is underwhelming. It suffers from that over-graded and glossy Netflix house style, so it’s never pleasing.

We Have a Ghost has a few compelling moments and plenty of promise, but it’s sufficiently broken and unsatisfying that I give it a thumbs down as the first subpar Landon film.

Now that you have successfully created a Groundhog Day slasher, a multiverse slasher, and a Freaky Friday body swap slasher, might I suggest one of the following high-concept movie stock plots for your next outing? Give me a call if you want a co-writer:

• It’s a Wonderful Life slasher: A final girl, suffering from PTSD years later, wishes she had never fought back and killed the masked murderer in the first place. She then finds herself in an alternate universe where the killer is still at large with many more victims, and she has to stop him once more to return to her own reality.
• Back to the Future slasher: The final girl travels back in time to try and prevent some murders from happening in the first place, but is forced to relive them and change their outcome.
• Truman Show slasher: Our characters are on a reality TV show without realizing it on which they have to survive a staged slasher movie, only for a real killer to enter the fray and go undetected and thanks to the set up of the show. Oh wait… this is the plot of Halloween: Resurrection, and nobody but me thinks that that one is any fun.
• Rashomon slasher: We relive the fateful night of a murder spree through multiple perspectives showing different realities, and revealing that there’s more to the murderer’s motivation than meets the eye. This one definitely needs a secret villain who seems like a good guy at first.

And a few more half-baked ideas to round things out… 50 First Slashes: every day, the hero loses their memory of the previous day and has to re-survive a murder attempt. Slasher-mento: murder spree told in reverse order due to short-term memory loss. Slasher Gump: it turns out every significant American event of the past fifty years has been the result of a serial killer’s stabby work.

Anyways, I’m burying the lede here. Freaky is tons of fun. (It was initially titled Freaky Friday the 13th, an amazing title, but Paramount reportedly threatened legal action.) It’s a slasher… but also a body swap movie. Hell yeah! Why did it take me three years to see this?

Landon remains an exciting horror-comedy filmmaker, constructing tense and gruesome murders but also some well-constructed laughs. He once again extracts terrific performances from his leads: Vince Vaughn as a teenage girl and Kathryn Newton as a burly serial killer. Vaughn and Newton carry the movie with their hilarious and physical performances. It’s hard to say who’s better — Vaughn is funnier, but Newton incinerates every one of her post-swap scenes with absurd intensity.

The story opens with a classic slasher intro: Some anonymous, debauching teens get stalked and murdered by a masked psycho nicknamed The Butcher (Vaughn). This opening scene might be the most suspenseful in the movie — it’s an impeccable specimen of thriller filmmaking, with great blocking and jump scare timing. If I were a producer, I’d be calling Landon’s agent to hire him to make a “normal” slasher at some point. It occurs to me that Bodies Bodies Bodies would have been both funnier and scarier if Landon had directed it. And can you imagine his take on a Halloween movie? The series might actually be fun to watch again.

Millie (Newton) is a mousy, unpopular high schooler who crushes from afar upon friendly jock Booker (Uriah Shelton). (By the way, casting Newton as a geeky pariah is as unrealistic as any of the movie’s supernatural antics.) Her mom and sister are still grieving from her father’s death a year earlier, an emotional thread that doesn’t go much of anywhere.

The Butcher chases Millie down after school one day and stabs her with a cursed dagger, which triggers the body swap. From there the movie hits just about every familiar body swap misunderstanding beat, with the added tension of one of the swappees being a vicious murderer.

After that, there aren’t really any big surprises left. The movie’s dominoes fall almost exactly where you might guess they would once you reach the halfway point. That’s probably the movie’s biggest problem: It coasts to its ending after a terrific set-up. There’s some unformed metaphoric content on gender and sexuality, but it’s no more coherent than your average horror movie.

That’s not to say Freaky is bad. Not at all. Only a certain stretch when The Butcher, now in Newton’s body, is tied up for a few scenes does the movie feel slack. But it doesn’t exactly push beyond its logline the way that, say, Happy Death Day snuck in a moving arc for its protagonist amid the killing.

The film does have one other major structural issue that I suspect will turn off slasher purists: Within the first few scenes, we have all of the heroes and villains divvied up: The good guys (best friends, crush, family) are never in real danger, and the bad guys (date rapist football players, cruel teacher, mean girls) drop like skewered flies. Their fates are obvious and match audience expectations. The best slashers have a little bit of cruelty to them that this one avoids, putting the emphasis on the comedy ahead of the thriller despite the heavy-R gore. (Oddly, Happy Death Day feels like a more authentic slasher but stuck to PG-13.)

The last hiccup is one that’s plagued Landon in all of his movies to date: A “killer escapes one last time” plot twist in the final fifteen minutes that doesn’t do much to the movie except to stretch out the runtime after a satisfying conclusion. Freaky runs just over 100 minutes, which is on the long side for a punchy comic thriller; 85 would have been perfect.

Despite my quibbles, I spent the entirety of Freaky with a smile on my face. It nails its premise with flair and energy. Vaughn reminds you he has real talent as a comedian, and Newton starring in a movie will now be reason enough for me to check it out. I can’t help but wonder what Landon will do next. I might even check out the panned, wacky-looking We Have a Ghost.