And now, this weekend, Drop is opening in theaters. Here's a look at some of the reviews:

Andrew Parker, The Gate

As a director, Landon looks like he’s having a blast getting his De Palma on (with a healthy nod to Wes Craven’s underrated/also implausible thriller Red Eye). As a stylistic exercise, Landon delivers his best outing behind the camera yet, which is fascinating for something that takes place in a single location for ninety percent of the film’s running time. The camera moves swiftly around the tightly packed room, zooming in from above, looking from below (the low angle shots of Violet looking up at her waiter are low key hilarious), and flowing through the space with ease. The little touches (like the bougie washroom and the ribcage mimicking corridor into the dining room that feel like entering the belly of a beast) are what matters here. Landon also does everything in his power to make the usually tedious image of people texting back and forth into a halfway compelling visual. It all comes together nicely, and Landon has put more thought into how the film should look than the sum of the plot’s parts.

And honestly, Drop is a case where that is absolutely the right call. Landon has a flair for allowing the viewer to giggle at dark situations, and he’s not afraid to get theatrical or unsubtle about it, like his use of some dramatic mood lighting swings throughout. He also finds ways to balance the dark humour with deeper character touches, with a heart to heart conversation between the stressed out lovebirds where all of the restaurant’s bustle and background noise pleasingly drifts away and the viewer locks into a tender moment that carries a great degree of poignancy for something that’s otherwise a silly movie.

More importantly: Have I made this sound like a bad movie? It’s actually largely a blast, not because Landon is as talented as De Palma, or even Collet-Serra, but because he works real hard to make up the difference. Moreso than the bright, montage-heavy, performance-dependent (and, to be clear, delightful) Happy Death Day pictures, he and cinematographer Marc Spicer go all in on visual tricks, with short but elegant room-surveying tracking shots, canted angles, impressionistic lighting effects to spotlight individual characters, and the occasional flips and spins for extra disorientation. This could have come across as sweaty, but it’s assembled with a glee that can’t be faked; the obvious effort becomes part of the fun.

This puts Drop well in the zone of Collet-Serra’s recent (and structurally similar) Carry-On, no small praise for the neo-Hitchcockian exercise. What keeps the new movie from further ascension to De Palma levels of bliss is its inability to push those attempts at virtuosity into a state of feverish cinematic overdrive, where the show-off fakeness somehow becomes more viscerally real. If this were easy, De Palma might not look like such a genius. As-is, Drop has a few brief moments of near-operatic derangement, a couple of flashbacks that experiment with bad-taste exploitation, and one climactic gag with a semi-twisted kick. Mostly, though, it trades in predictable stuff about Violet overcoming her past traumas as she navigates this brand new one.

Landon can flip this into a strength; just as the Happy Death Day movies are disarmingly sweet amidst jokes about gruesome slapstick demises, this movie obviously feels warmly toward Violet and he treats a few side characters here, like a too-much server (Jeffrey Self) on his first-ever shift, with similar affection. Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance. To work so well in the moment is its own perfectly ephemeral achievement.

#DroptheMovie is a hard driving nail-biter, that keeps you hanging on the edge. Christopher Landon channels his inner De Palma, in a fresh take on the classic whodunnit. While it takes its time getting there, the climax is worth the wait. Thrill seekers will rejoice.