‘Passenger’ Review – A Road Trip Horror Flick With Solid Intrigue That Hits A Dead End At Horror Trope Lane

André Øvredal is a fascinating filmmaker to view within the horror space, specifically in the numerous ways his horror films tend to end up more frustrating despite the decent amounts of promise they hold. Øvredal genuinely has a solid knack for how to nicely set up a scare and build the right amount of tension, which tends to always be undone by obvious jump scares or a cavalcade of every horror trope known to man, leading to an experience that unravels nearly every ounce of intrigue it had.

Øvredal’s latest feature, Passenger, unfortunately, falls victim to the pitfalls we’ve seen in many genre pictures, but it’s particularly irritating in this case, considering the concept of a road trip horror movie isn’t bad from conception. The film is actually able to get a solid amount of mileage surrounding the different types of scares and real road anxieties that can be effective when executed within a supernatural horror movie, so it’s a shame that whenever Passenger attempts to hone into its main two blank slate characters and the insanely underwhelming lore and predictable reveals surrounding the mystery of its titular entity is when Passenger falls asleep at the wheel.

After a relatively solid cold open (that was unfortunately pretty much all in the trailers), properly giving us an idea of the scares to come, Passenger focuses on Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), a couple who just recently decided to officially live life on the road as they move out of their apartment and become at one with the life of van living. While adjusting to their new road life after a couple of weeks, Tyler even proposes to Maddie, and the two seem as content as can be, but of course, things take a turn.

While Maddie is driving on the road one night, the couple comes across a car driving wildly next to them. Little do they know, it’s the car from the victim that was present in the film’s opening scene. After Maddie and Tyler witness the car crash, they exit their vehicle to see if they can help, but it turns out to be a huge mistake as their vehicle gets marked with 3 slashes, making them targets of the ghostly entity known as the passenger (Joseph Lopez). With the ghostly presence continuously affecting their journeys, Maddie and Tyler must seek out how they can get rid of this entity before it decides to finally kill them.

Passenger’s logline admittedly sounds a bit more silly than you’d maybe expect for a horror film, but the film actually works best when its ambitions are mainly focused on setting up dread or being playful with scares it can utilize in its setting. For instance, the movie uses a lot of scenarios like reaching below the steering wheel to pick up something you dropped, or the flashing red lights or your car’s brake lights hiding something in the night, even an air bag popping so hard it rips your head off; the movie is at its most creative when it leans into this simplicity. Øvredal’s work with DP Federico Verardi also smartly uses one-takes throughout its build of tension throughout the film’s first half, so it’s a shame that even the positives of the movie end up having holes to poke through them.

There are countless moments in Passenger where Øvredal directs the build-up for a scare sequence so effectively, only for the entire scene to be let down by the most obvious loud jumpscare by the titular passenger in the film. A sequence involving Maddie worriedly rushing to the van being moved further and further away from her during the night makes great use of a continued circling one take and knowing sometimes the most effective scare can be the sound of the unknown, but then all that build up leads to the most obvious final scare ever through the passenger getting his face super close to the van’s dash cam. The progressive decline of smart setups to generic loud jump scares doesn’t only make the film more boring, but also makes an innovative concept no different from your run-of-the-mill haunted house horror flick.

It doesn’t help matters that Maddie and Tyler are about the single most interesting pair of characters you could follow on a journey like this. The two have virtually nothing interesting about them, besides vaguely stated exposition dumps during slower scenes in between horror, where they talk about Tyler’s love of the van life or Maddie’s foster background for 2 seconds and never again. It’s the most generic couple in a horror movie duo you could probably think of, and it’s where the movie commonly leans into more tropes like Tyler not believing Maddie’s hauntings at first, which is so horror 101.

Nothing, however, is more egregious than when the film decides to add lore and explanation to the existence of its entity. When a horror movie decides to add mythology or explanation behind its supernatural happenings, it’s a tough line to walk because it needs to be interesting enough not to spoil the eeriness behind the titular horror, but unfortunately, Passenger isn’t able to do so. All the lore behind the passengers’ existence is just straight up unneeded here and only makes the film fall for more horror trope traps rather than pave its own path.

Maddie and Tyler eventually learn about things like the hobo code and learn from more exposition dumps from another road traveler, Diana (Melissa Leo), about some religious background surrounding the legend of St. Christopher, about why the passenger takes road travelers the way he does, but all the movie’s attempts at explaining things ironically lead to more questions. Sometimes the scariest things about an evil presence are that we know nothing about it, and Passenger doesn’t seem to realize this at all through its runtime.

Verdict:

Despite director André Øvredal’s solid background for how to set up a scare, the vast majority of Passenger will leave most completely adrift. The film ends up having a solid scare or two up its sleeve when it focuses on the simple but effective road-themed atmosphere, but the more Passenger devolves into a mundane fright flick that overexplains its mythology, the more one realizes this film is a one-way drive to the generic horror tropes lane.