The poster for Christopher Landon’s “Drop” features star Meghann Fahy’s eyes peering over the top of a cellphone. This image conveys everything you need to know about “Drop,” a techno-thriller about a first date sent off the rails by a series of threatening airdrops, but it also nods to the most important cinematic tool in Landon’s kit.

In this one-setting genre piece, Fahy’s character Violet spends most of her time scanning a restaurant trying to identify who could be tormenting her. Her big blue eyes are searching, concerned, tremulous and tearful. She weeps beautifully, a crucial aspect of this performance.

The eyes have it because Landon spends so much of “Drop” on his star, keeping her emotional journey front and center, while strapping the audience into a front-row seat for this panicky situation. Fahy, who has played a plucky young journalist in “The Bold Type,” a knowing friend in “The White Lotus” and a tragic party girl in “The Perfect Couple,” plays Violet, a young widowed mother on her first date in a long time. A survivor of intimate partner violence and the mother to Toby (Jacob Robinson), she’s nervous for her dinner with handsome photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar) at an upscale restaurant on the top floor of a high-rise building. But her jitters are eclipsed by the uneasiness, anxiety and terror she experiences when she starts receiving unsolicited messages via an app called DigiDrop.

The messages move from memes to demands, coupled with threats against her son and sister (Violett Beane). Watching a masked gunman enter her home on her security camera app, Violet is pressured to comply with an order to poison Henry, who happens to work for the city mayor.

“Drop,” written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, is a little bit like a Lifetime movie version of “Michael Clayton,” though it is elevated by Landon’s sense of style. The genre auteur has excelled with cutesy horror movie concepts like “Happy Death Day” (a slasher version of “Groundhog Day”) and “Freaky” (a slasher “Freaky Friday”), and while “Drop” is less horror, more thriller, the limited setting allows Landon to experiment in his cinematic storytelling.

He alternates between longer takes that survey and set the scene in the restaurant, establishing the circular space and the characters within in it: a chatty server (Jeffery Self), a kind bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), a lecherous piano player (Ed Weeks), a bro on his phone who keeps bumping into Violet (Travis Nelson), a nervous older man on a blind date himself (Reed Diamond). In retrospect, you’ll see how Landon subtly nods to the identity of Violet’s tormentor through editing and cinematography, using an abrasive, choppy cutting style, the character invading the space like an intrusive airdrop.

Landon’s intense focus on Violet requires a Herculean facial performance from Fahy, and part of what makes “Drop” so great is watching the way this woman immediately slips into a pattern of masking and accommodating, a survival skill from her abusive past. So it is deeply satisfying when Violet makes the switch from passive to aggressive, when she stops merely surviving and starts fighting back.

It’s Landon’s visual style and Fahy’s empathetic performance that makes “Drop” so much more than just a silly high-concept woman-in-peril movie of the week. While the material alone could have been basic, what Landon makes of it with such stylish and emotional execution is anything but.

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violent content, suicide, some strong language and sexual references)

Running time: 1:40

How to watch: In theaters