PASSENGER (Movie Review)
Passenger made me wanna keep driving and never look back. And it wasn’t because it was scary. Because it’s not. At all. This is director André Øvredal’s worst film by a mile. He usually is great at building dread with patience and precision, even in lesser entries in his filmography like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Which makes this limp supernatural road trip all the more disappointing.
This is the filmmaker who gave audiences the suffocating unease of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, the stormy gothic atmosphere of The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and yet Passenger feels like a movie assembled from rejected ideas left behind in the glove compartment of better horror films.
To its credit, the opening sequence almost fools you into thinking something worthwhile is ahead. Two friends cruise down a deserted highway at night before the film detonates into a genuinely effective title-card scare staged with real tension and visual control. For about five minutes, Øvredal tricks you into believing you’re seated for what might be an all-timer.
Then the movie immediately swerves into a ditch of stale mythology, bargain-bin jump scares, and exposition so clunky it arrives with hazard lights.
Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), a Brooklyn couple testing out van life, stumble into the orbit of a demonic highway drifter after stopping at the site of a grisly crash. What should be a tale with endless dark roads occupied by a supernatural force riding shotgun, instead continuously stops dead to explain itself until every ounce of mystery leaks out onto the pavement.
The biggest obstacle is that Maddie and Tyler are astonishingly dull people to spend ninety-four minutes with.
Tyler treats van life like a spiritual awakening ripped from a YouTube influencer channel, while Maddie spends most of the film looking one inconvenience away from demanding they go back to Brooklyn immediately.
The screenplay tosses in minor morsels of backstory, like foster care trauma and some sort of family issues that don’t add anything or go anywhere. Bob Ross quotes are repeated as if writers T.W. Burgess and Zachary Donohue mistook it for quirky character texture.
Llobell and Scipio try their best, and there’s at least some relief in watching horror protagonists who occasionally communicate like functioning adults instead of complete idiots, but the script gives them almost nothing to work with besides endless reaction shots and repetitive conversations about how weird things are getting.
Melissa Leo shows up as a weary van-life veteran, existing purely to dump exposition about “The Highwayman from Hell,” a supernatural stalker governed by rules so arbitrary they might as well have been written while waiting for the light to turn green. Passenger piles on lore with such frantic determination that the Passenger himself becomes less frightening the more he appears. What little menace he earned in the cold opening is all gone by the climax when he’s popping into frame screaming.
Øvredal occasionally flashes a level of craftsmanship that made previous work memorable. I liked a moment where Maddie nervously crosses a parking lot while the camera slowly rotates around, weaponizing empty space instead of noise.
Also worth noting is a date night where Maddie and Tyler watch Roman Holiday on a projector, lighting up the woods while the Passenger lurks beyond Audrey Hepburn’s smiling face. It’s a sad reminder of what this film could have been.
For a while, I was wondering if Passenger was PG-13. It’s pretty bloodless and barely any language. That is, until the end, when a neck snaps backward in a spray of blood and exposed tissue. While enjoyable, it feels imported from a much better film.
Isolated moments of style can’t rescue a story trapped in an endless cycle of repetitive fake-outs and brain-dead decision making. Øvredal mistakes loudness for terror, hammering viewers with the same shrieking jump scares until it becomes numbing.
And the climax arrives with such lazy convenience that the entire journey feels pointless. Even Øvredal got tired and decided to pull over early. Passenger spends its runtime spinning its wheels in place. The final eye-roll is Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” over the credits, a bad decision on a trip full of them.
