SPOILER WARNING: The following article gives away several key details from Drop. If you have not yet seen the new 2025 movie, I am not necessarily suggesting you drop everything and go watch it first, but I do recommend you proceed with caution if you continue to read on.
The last few years have been an exceptional time for the horror genre, and 2025 has proven to be no exception with releases like Drop. I finally got around to seeing the suspense-drenched flick when it became available with a Peacock subscription and have almost nothing but great things to say about it… even though it does feel a little familiar.
In fact, director Christopher Landon’s latest Blumhouse movie reminded me quite a bit of another thriller from the early 2000s that I just happened to revisit only less than a week earlier. So, what film am I referring to, and just how similar is it to Drop? Feast your eye on this…
Wes Craven’s Red Eye, which is currently available with a Netflix subscription, stars Rachel McAdams as a recovering trauma victim who boards an airplane where a stranger (played by Cillian Murphy, who is not the biggest fan of the movie, apparently) coerces her into aiding a politically motivated murder by threatening to have a remote assassin kill her father (played by Brian Cox). Along the way, she tries every trick she can think of to outwit the manipulative criminal or get a fellow passenger to help without calling the villain’s attention to her efforts.
Now, all I would need to do is alter a few details from the 2005 film, and we essentially have the plot of Drop. Instead of an airplane, Meghann Fahy’s Violet finds herself trapped in a rooftop restaurant where she receives anonymous messages on her phone demanding that she murder her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), or her sister, Jen (Violet Beane), and young son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), are dead. With the villain taunting Violet through ominous memes and the film’s queer-coded themes, this is essentially a modern take on Red Eye, and the similarities do not even stop there.
the Taylors in Red Eye.
Red Eye is a wonderful thriller that still holds up remarkably well two decades later, and is easily one of Wes Craven’s most underrated efforts. However, I must admit that, overall, Drop surpasses it in my book by a pretty good margin.
First of all, I love the way the film keeps the antagonist’s identity a mystery for much of its runtime, unlike how Red Eye reveals the true intentions of Murphy’s Jackson Rippner pretty quickly. I also believe Drop puts its protagonist through even more distressing obstacles, as Red Eye’s Lisa is merely forced to make an assassination easier to complete, while Violet is forced to kill Henry herself. Finally, depicting everything that happens in the restaurant in real time (a severely underused narrative device, if you ask me) kept me on pins and needles throughout.
Ya know, normally I would be disappointed to find that I watched two eerily similar films in such close proximity, but I could have watched these back to back during a double feature and I have no doubt it would have been time well spent. So, in other words, I certainly recommend that you stream Drop on Peacock, and perhaps you should follow it by streaming Red Eye on Netflix, too.