A suspense thriller has to be intense. Enough to make a filmgoer a tad uncomfortable but not so much as to be off-putting. Drop is just intense enough without going over the line. It’s rated PG-13, not R.

Violet (Meghann Fahy) is a widow with a 5-year-old son. She’s finally ready to date again. She agrees to meet Henry (Brandon Sklenar) for dinner. When she arrives at the restaurant she has quick encounters with a few staff members and patrons.

After Henry arrives, she begins getting threatening messages on her phone and wonders what’s going on. As the tension builds, it also occasionally ebbs throughout the ordeal via Henry’s gentle demeanor and a comic-relief goofy server.

As relatable as a constantly pinging cellphone can be, and as annoying as text messages from unknown sources can be, coupled with the awareness that we are often being surveilled, Drop takes our modern tech and the constant attachment we have to our cellphones to a different level. 

As Meghann monitors camera shots from her home and considers the potential peril her son Toby and her babysitting sister Jen (Violett Beane) may face, she wonders who is behind all this troubling harassment. Another restaurant customer? The piano player? The goofy server?

During their conversation, Meghann reveals to Henry that she is a survivor of domestic abuse. Interestingly, Brandon Sklenar played a key character in last year’s It Ends With Us, another film involving an abuse survivor. 

Director Christopher Landon and writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach have crafted a film that feels very “of today” with its focus on phone messages delivered via Air Drop. Still, Drop seems like a rather generic title. 

Drop clocks in just under an hour-and-a-half, so the suspense which some filmmakers stretch to ridiculous limits, is kept to a reasonable extent. Like the film’s intensity level, it’s not too much. Just enough.