I always think about a particular scene from Her, Spike Jonze’s somewhat-prescient tech romance from 2013. Our protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) has fallen in love with his new Siri-like operating system “Samantha,” breathily voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She suggests that they try to have sex. He is perplexed, wonders how this would even be possible. She says she will arrange for a woman to come to Theodore’s apartment—a live human woman who will remain silent during the foreplay and intercourse so Samantha can supply the voiceover. This way, Theodore will have the illusion of Samantha having a body, of being able to have sex with “her.”
What results, though, is a strange, deficient, and disjointed sexual experience—a voided body and a disembodied voice unable to combine as one so much so that they each grow in their incompleteness. There are a lots of takeaways to Her, but a big one in this scene is more of a comment: that, however powerful robots grow in imitating and surpassing the capacities of the human brain and however they seem able to reproduce the texture of the human soul, they still need a human body to do their bidding in a human world.
This scene popped into my head as I contemplated Drop, the new Blumhouse thriller from director Christopher Landon and writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach. The story is about a young, widowed mother named Violet (Meghann Fahy) who goes on a date for the first time since her husband passed. She has met Henry (Brandon Sklenar) online, on a dating app, and he’s patiently waited months for her to be comfortable enough meeting him in person. Their date is to take place at a rooftop restaurant in the city (the film takes place in Chicago, not that this matters at all), and Violet shows up early, nervous, dressed to the nines, checking her phone both for notifications of Henry’s arrival and security camera updates of her sister and son safe at home. But as she’s waiting, she begins to get a series of “drops” to her phone from a stranger. You know what I mean by “drops”… those messages that land on your phone outside text messaging and other apps; they can only be sent from a phone in close proximity. In the movie, the radius is 50 ft.
The drops are creepy, performatively and giddily sinister. “Get ready for the worst night of your life,” one says, over a meme. Violet finds this odd, but then her date shows up. He’s handsome and charming, and they build an easy rapport… but then her phone buzzes. The drops keep coming. More than simply taunt her, they begin informing her that she’s being watched. More importantly… so is her family. A message tells her to check her security camera app; when she does, she sees a man wearing a balaclava and holding a gun in her living room. Her sister Jen (Violett Beane) and her little son Toby (Jacob Robinson) are upstairs, safe for now, but, the stranger tells Violet, the moment she disobeys the drops, her sister and son will die.
Violet tries to come up with a plan, but she’s quickly informed not to bother; her phone is cloned, there are cameras all around, and someone is watching her directly… if she tells her date what’s happening, or anyone else, the gunman will kill her family. Instead, she has to pretend she’s having fun on her date, and await instructions. The stranger wants her to do something, and will leverage her in this fashion until she does it. Still, she knows that the drops must be coming from someone in the restaurant with her, and is motivated to try to investigate whenever she can.
What follows is a contained, calibrated thriller—it’s basically Blumhouse-does-Hitchcock, and it works well. It does feel formulaic, but this is not a criticism. I, personally, love a movie that follows a formula well. I mean, the thing about formulas is… they lead you to the right answer. But also, Christopher Landon makes movies that deeply interact with the formulas they follow, sometimes mashing together two types of formulas into one. His film Freaky is a body-switch comedy but where a A-student Good Girl switches bodies with a Michael Myers-esque serial killer. His film Happy Death Day is Groundhog Day but as a campus slasher. These films lean into their unoriginality (non-pejoratively used) and turn it into a strength. Same with Drop, which is Dial M for Murder meets The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse meets another recent Blumhouse feature, AfrAId.
The nominal villain of the film is the person behind these drops, but the film allows surveillance to be the real villain.Drop‘s clear blueprint allows its overlaying commentary to shine. This is film about the insidious encroachment of technology in everyday life. The nominal villain of the film is the person behind these drops, but the film allows surveillance to be the real villain. In fact, the surveillance in the film is nearly supernatural. Between seeing whatever Violet is doing on her phone and picking up (through tiny cameras and microphones) everything she’s doing in the restaurant, it seems that the surveillance at work can do everything but read her mind… and it’s pretty good at predicting what she’s about to do, based on all the evidence it’s gathering about her reactions and behavior. The fact that there is ultimately, inevitably, a human pulling the technological strings is moot… the stranger appears on Violet’s phone as a username and avatar: “Let’s_Play” and an emoji that looks something like this: 😈. “Let’s_Play” becomes a separate entity, looming over the festivity of the evening, controlling everything and everyone.
Meanwhile, Vi0let and Henry are presented to us as relentlessly human. Their jobs are analog (she is a therapist, he is a photographer), and, furthermore, threatened by the AI-ification of the commercial world. They meet on a dating app but hate the transactional tech of it all. “I really hate these apps,” Henry tells Violet, going on to explain that Violet’s simple, humble profile was what attracted him to her, made him reach out. He tells her that she just seemed like a good mom to her little boy. Both Fahy and Sklenar give particularly emotional performances—their expressive faces and eyes are constantly pronouncing their feelings, just as much as (or even more than) their words.
Drop then twists a new dynamic into shape: technology vs. humans, with technology as the aggressor. What starts out as a palpably compassionate and personable date is ruined by the intrusion of cell phones. Violet is being held hostage into checking her phone (for instructions, to check up on her family), but her date doesn’t know that. What he observes is yet another person glued to her cell phone, someone unable to enjoy a meal or even have a conversation without glancing at it.
The virtual hostage situation is an exaggeration of Violet’s normal condition: she, a mom (with a traumatic backstory) initially checks her phone repeatedly as a kind of anxiety tic. This is very relatable, especially in this day and age. But it’s also a tiny little indictment of how we’ve gotten so used to looking at our phones as a culture; I mean, not to blame anyone, but if our protagonist threw her phone into Airplane Mode to concentrate on her date, there’d be no hostage situation at all. If she had brought a book, we would not have this problem.
But none of this is Violet’s fault; this is the world we live in. Violet is trapped by technology, already, even before the hostage situation begins, just as we all are. As she watches the security cameras in her house, she is tortured by her own passivity; there is an intruder about to threaten her family, and all she can do is watch.
This is the kind of meta moment you’d expect from a horror movie, especially a Blumhouse horror movie; when we, the audience, watch a horror movie, we cannot intervene in the action; all we can do is watch, too. But Drop isn’t interested in making commentary about or connections to “movies,” so much as observing the strangleholds offered by the small(est) screen, the ways that we are conditioned to “watch” all the time, and how it makes us passive, and not active, players in our own lives.
As such, the technological puppetmaster and the account “Let’s_Play” need human servants for its mission. This is not a film that portrays either humans or technology as self-sufficient. The person behind “Let’s_Play” can’t use technology to complete their nefarious goals… they can only hide behind it. The “Let’s_Play” account needs a human to do its bidding. People can’t fully hide behind their robots; conversely, the robots still need people with bodies to do things they can’t. There’s a give-and-take between the human and the inhuman; or rather, a souping-up of the human through technology that leads to dangerous results.
Nothing is as important to Drop as “the personal,” on every level. Outsourcing our interactions to technology is, the film argues, a fundamentally bad idea. It’s a funny claim for a movie to make, but Drop points out that a world with less watching wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
