Reviews: DROP and THE UNINVITED

 by Rob DiCristino

Can’t stop. Won’t stop. Movies!

Drop (Dir. Christopher Landon)

If the Blumhouse school of horror has any principal architects, one of them has to be Christopher Landon, whose multi-hyphenate work on the Paranormal Activity and Happy Death Day franchises — coupled with the charming Freaky and this year’s Heart Eyes — has come to exemplify the look and feel of modern mainstream horror. Rather than churning out slavish love letters to the splatter-core maestros of the past, Landon seems genuinely interested in crafting genre thrillers for audiences who spend as much time on Tik Tok as they do on Scream Factory box sets. That’s certainly no sleight against Landon, who understands that every new generation of genre fans deserves their own Halloweens and Texas Chainsaws. His latest is Drop, a high-concept but surprisingly low-fi thriller that combines iPhone aesthetics with Hitchcockian plotting for a final product that focuses so acutely on the strength of its atmosphere and performances that you won’t notice until after the credits roll that not one second of it makes a single, solitary lick of sense.

Still reeling from the dissolution of her abusive marriage, Violet (The White Lotus’ Meghann Fahy) has decided to take a risk on handsome photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar, a charming screen presence who nonetheless recalls a Dollar Tree Josh Hartnett). Their first date is set for an upscale Chicago restaurant, and while Henry’s flags are so green they border on incriminating, Violet can’t focus on anything but her son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), whom she’s left at home for the first time since his father’s death. The distractions get worse when she begins receiving mysterious AirDrops — sorry, “DigiDrops” — from an unknown sender nearby. What begin as innocuous memes quickly become threats against Toby and his aunt (Violett Beane), threats demanding that Violet keep her mouth shut and follow the sender’s orders. Now, she must suss out their identity before it’s too late: Is it the boozy piano player (Ed Weeks)? The fifty-something on his own disastrous first date (Reed Strickland)? Someone else? One way or another, the clock is ticking.

Writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, who also penned Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, find a satisfying enough balance between familiar genre elements and inventive inversions to make the plot against Violet — one that is, again, thoroughly incoherent once revealed — feel engrossing and immediate as you’re watching it unfold. Aided by genre mainstay Bear McCreary’s bawdy score and smart work by editor Ben Baudhin, Landon presents a stylish palette that reaches for Fincher and De Palma without ever overstepping its bounds. The director is clearly learning valuable lessons with each new feature, here trusting his tiny cast — most of all Fahy, who shines — to convey with their performances what less-confident directors would jury-rig with dialogue and editing. If anything, the time spent establishing such a precise narrative landscape in the restaurant actually robs Drop of some steam when it inevitably shifts away, but not even a forgettable final act can discount the work of a filmmaker who may soon be considered among the best in his class.

Drop hits U.S. theaters on Friday, April 11th.

The Uninvited (Dir. Nadia Conners)

There’s something about a fancy party that lends itself to traditional narrative structure: We start with the hosts, establish their dynamics and set some stakes, and then gradually introduce the guests as complications for them to work through. There’s even an ebb and flow to those complications that recall the “rising action” graphics in old Syd Field screenwriting books. Think of the last party you went to — I mean, it’s hard for me because I’ve gone to so many because I am very cool and popular — and consider how the energy shifts every few hours: First is the mix of nerves and excitement as the guests shake off their pre-party selves. Next — usually after the first round or two of libations — comes The Grouping, the part where everyone picks the room or circle they’ll occupy for the night. Third is the sweet spot, the part where everyone’s just drunk enough to be in a good mood but not so much so that they start making mistakes. If you’re lucky, your party climaxes in this spot and shifts into a hazy denouement of decompression and kissing.

Rose (Elizabeth Reaser) is not so lucky in The Uninvited, the narrative debut of documentarian Nadia Conners. Her fancy Hollywood Hills party is part of a larger scheme by her talent agent husband (Conners’ real-life spouse Walton Goggins as Sammy) to honor his biggest client (Rufus Sewell as Gerald) and draw interest in what he hopes will be a profitable new independent venture. Their marriage is already fraying — Rose gave up a fulfilling career on the stage to raise their young son (Roland Rubio) and hasn’t forgiven Sammy or, we suspect, herself — and the pressures of throwing a shindig of this size are exacerbated by the unexpected arrival of Helen (Louis Smith), an elderly woman who confuses their mansion for her own home. As Rose searches for a living relative to retrieve Helen, Sammy schmoozes with Hollywood A-listers like Delia (Eva De Dominici) — basically Rose minus twenty years — and Lucien (Pedro Pascal), a charming lush whose on-and-off-stage romance with Rose complicates an already-stressful situation even more.

It’s no surprise that Rose’s roots are in the theater, as the small-scale, dialogue-heavy Uninvited plays like a stage production brought to the screen. Free of the slapstick setpieces that are usually injected into these single-location indies for no other reason than to make their trailers more exciting, the film relies instead on a pair of thoughtful and incisive performances from veterans Reaser and Goggins, both of whom give unexpected texture to archetypes we’ve seen countless times before. Sammy is the callow, cocaine-addled star-fucker who’s long-since sold out to the highest bidder, sure, but Goggins gives him a thick coating of insecurity that leads us to believe there’s still some hope for his soul. Reaser is the clear author avatar, though, a forty-something actress resigned to domesticity once Hollywood no longer found her sufficiently fuckable. As Helen slowly reveals a backstory not dissimilar to her own, Rose comes to terms with that fate, giving The Uninvited a poignancy that other Hollywood satires fail to conjure.

The Uninvited hits limited U.S. theaters on Friday, April 11th.