There are bad first dates: he shows up locked, she's banging on about her ex, everyone's glued to their phone.

Then there are bad first dates. The ones where you get mysterious messages threatening your family and coercing you into murder.

Such a nightmare outing is the premise of Christopher Landon's stylish new thriller, Drop.

“I think everyone can identify with the feelings of being on a first date, how vulnerable you feel and the anxiety that comes with it,” the director tells Hot Press from Los Angeles.

“There’s the hopefulness as well, because that's why we're all doing it, right? We’re trying to find our other half, so we're already in a heightened state of mind.”

Drop follows Violet, played by Meghann Fahy (The White Lotus season 2). She’s a single mother and survivor of an abusive relationship, working as a therapist for women who've had similar experiences.

“It’s a sensitive topic that's close to me,” Landon shares, touching on Violet’s history with domestic violence. “I've been through experiences with people that I love. So for me it was very much about approaching that topic with a lot of sensitivity and empathy.

“It’s an important part of her journey and her character's arc. She’s a woman who has tried to build a life out of helping other women like her.

“Then she gets re-victimised and has no choice but to face it. It really informs why she's making the decisions that she's making. It would be really easy for her to just do what she's being told to do.

“But because of her past, she is not willing to be a victim again. That's why she fights so hard to try to save this man who's really still just a stranger to her.”

(from left) Director Christopher Landon and Meghann Fahy on the set of Drop.

It's refreshing to see a female lead in the thriller/action genre who isn't a damsel awaiting rescue by some code-cracking superman.

“I am a huge fan of badass women,” Landon says. “I was raised by a few of them. One of my earliest and favourite memories of going to the cinema was seeing Alien and cheering for Sigourney Weaver.

“I love strong women and I think I've actually tried to build a career around them. From Tree in Happy Death Day to Millie from Freaky - they're all really strong, but they're flawed too. They're human, which is really important to me.”

Busy coddling her son Toby and with her trust in men eroded, Violet hasn’t been on a date in a while. After three months of cautious online chatting, she decides to meet handsome local photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar) for dinner at a high-end restaurant in a Chicago skyscraper.

Upon her arrival Violet starts receiving anonymous airdrops from someone nearby. The texts are benign and cheesy, until they aren’t. Her phone continues to ping and buzz as the drops get creepier, prodding her to check the security cameras at home, revealing a masked gunman in the living room.

A deal is laid out: kill Henry or Toby dies. There’s not much she can do either, the entire restaurant is bugged and her every move is being monitored.

It’s a hermetic plight that raises questions about our safety in the era of all-seeing tech.

“Our producers were at dinner and somebody was sending them weird airdrops,” Landon says. “And they spent the whole night trying to figure out who was doing it. They never solved that mystery, but they walked away from that experience with the kernel idea of this movie.

“It's not the technology that scares me. It's people who scare me. There are always bad people who will abuse technology to either inflict harm or take advantage of people.

“I think most people have been harassed or abused by someone they don't know, can't see, can't find and can't respond to in person. So I think that's a very relatable part of the movie.”

(from left) Henry (Brandon Sklenar) and Violet (Meghann Fahy) in Drop, directed by Christopher Landon.

The circular open-plan setting adds to the claustrophobia. Drop went a step further with the realism. The restaurant was fully operational, with an on-site chef, kitchen staff, and waitstaff that included members of the cast. Authentic orders could be processed at the till and every detail was branded with the logo, including menus and butter pats.

“We had a real chef who designed our menu, which was beautifully printed and presented to all the patrons who were in the restaurant,” Landon says. “We had real food that he made that people ate. It was delicious - the steak was amazing, though the coconut calamari wasn't my cup of tea. We also had staff that we had to train.

“It's just really immersive. It’s funny, when Meghann and Brandon came to the set for the first time, we made sure everyone was fully dressed and we had put all the extras in. So they walked into what looked like a real restaurant and they were so gobsmacked by the whole thing. I could see how it impacted the performance. They start to forget they're on a set.”

For all its bells, whistles and calamari, Drop, at its core, is simply a crisp and entertaining thriller.

“It's a kind of movie I love and it's a kind of movie that’s gone away a little bit,” Landon says. “Modern Hitchcock -  that was the vibe that I wanted to go for. The man was stylish and he wasn't afraid of pushing that in the service of story.

“If you're doing style for style's sake - to look flashy and be cool - then you're really just making a music video, you're not making a movie.

“[Hitchcock] knew how to build tension. Some of the sequences in Rear Window are such incredible moments and were so far ahead of their time. Having any opportunity to emulate that is such a joy.”

• Drop is in cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: