In the past couple of years, but especially in these last few months, “eat the rich” satires have proliferated through mainstream media. Triangle of Sadness forced an array of wealthy idiots onto a drowning yacht sloshed with poo. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel Glass Onion torched billionaires like Elon Musk and their foolish lackeys. The Menu served greed as an appetizer at a fictional fine dining restaurant. And, of course, The White Lotus made us all cry laughing, as we watched Jennifer Coolidge fall to her death, Aubrey Plaza get hammered on a Sicilian wine tour, and Michael Imperioli pay $50,000 to his son’s hooker.
The Drop replicates this agitating buzzing of brattiness—with the shocking addition of a woman dropping a baby on its head and having a life crisis over the matter. Instead of taking issue with wealthy folks specifically, though, Hulu’s new satire prods at a more general cast of nuisances. The film feels like a neighboring exposé, criticizing anyone and everyone’s (but particularly Americans’) bad habit of disconnecting with the outside world—especially while visiting foreign lands.
Three couples ferry off to a beachside resort in Mexico run by the fourth duo in the group, where two of the friends plan to get married. Things get awkward—but in that enticing White Lotus way, where you watch while cringing and shuddering at the thought of knowing these people in real life.
For example: Lex (Anna Konkle), our leading lady, has dated one half of every couple on the island. She introduced Mia (Aparna Nancherla) to dating women, and now Mia’s set to wed Peggy (Jennifer Lafleur). Lex had an interestingly erotic relationship with Josh (Joshua Leonard), who now owns the Mexican resort with his partner Lindsey (Jillian Bell). She even had a fling with Robbie (Utkarsh Ambudkar), though he’s now married to TV star Shauna (Robin Thede), with whom he shares an adopted incel tween Levi (Elisha Henig).
Lex attends Mia and Peggy’s wedding with her husband Mani (Jermaine Fowler), who joins her reluctantly. He only agrees after pleading with his wife to abandon the trip and instead fly to Brooklyn to surprise his mother (Monnae Michaell) for her birthday. No such luck. Lex packs their bags and forces Mani on a flight to Mexico. Though she has been tasked with preparing the wedding cake (she runs a bakery) and writing the couple’s vows (how bizarre), Lex has a bigger goal in mind for her getaway with Mani: She wants to conceive a baby with him while on the trip.
Through passive-aggressive comments about it from Mani and Lex’s moms, as well as glimpses at their odd conception techniques, we learn that the pair has been trying to get pregnant for quite some time. They have a healthy sex life and a happy marriage, quickly demonstrated with good sex and kitchen canoodling. Lex’s friend group, rather, are a total turn-off for Mani—not only have they all dated each other, an incestuous pool of bragging about new spouses and new sex lives, but they’re also all just really weird.
There’s pressure for Mani to perform in bed on this trip, but he’s preoccupied with Lex’s berserk friend group bringing guns to Mexico, trying to rope one another into pyramid schemes, and telling him TMI details of their past relationships with Lex. How can you have sex in that environment? Then, to make matters worse, chaos ensues: While holding Mia and Peggy’s sweet little baby girl, Lex gets distracted by something (we don’t know what) and drops the baby, headfirst, onto concrete sidewalk. Um, ouch.
What happens next is both completely related and entirely unrelated to the baby’s near-fatal tumble. A series of dilemmas arise in the friend group surrounding Lex’s abilities to parent, the concept of parenting as a whole, and how to make compromises in marriage. Lex, played with brilliant awkwardness from Pen15 alum Konkle, spirals out of control, including shedding her clothes to soothe her body in the ocean. Mani tries to remain level-headed, but how can you, when your spouse is flailing around in bed with ocean fleas after having nearly committed infanticide?
The conversations surrounding friendship, parenting, love, and millennial hopelessness imbue the film with unflinching vulnerability and uncomfortable hilarity. None of the arguments the film makes are all that deep—parenting should be taken seriously; sometimes it’s OK for friends to drift apart; marriage is a tricky beast; white people owning a Mexican resort is very bad; a stable sex life can be hard to keep up after years together—but that’s perfectly fine. We’ve seen similarly fun, thrilling films like Glass Onion and The Menu get steeped in discourse, slammed for being too on-the-nose. The fact that The Drop doesn’t take itself too seriously should be a welcome revision of those films’ satirical approach.
At the same time, The Drop may come across like the mid-budget version of The White Lotus. With a pretty funny script from Leonard along with Sarah Adina Smith, who also directed, the movie feels like one whole fantastical nightmare, without all the prestigious glitz and glamor of an HBO original.
The strong acting helps too: Fowler walks away with the movie, thanks to a performance that’s almost comparable to that of Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out. As Mani, he shifts from baffled confusion to utter despair over the course of one freakish libertarian wedding. But The Drop is clearly an ensemble movie, just like The White Lotus, with fully realized characters drawn up for each of the eight wedding attendees.
As discourse rages online about similarly fun films about rich people—including questions of whether or not The Menu was good, if Glass Onion made a salient enough point about mega billionaires, and if there was an actual point to The White Lotus—The Drop feels like a perfect middle-ground movie. It should appease audiences who want to laugh and get uncomfortable without thinking too hard about the movie’s greater themes. These people are weird fools. Now, let’s all laugh at them arguing over dropped babies.
