Passenger

Grade: C+

If you’ve seen the wonderful teaser trailer for Passenger, you’ve basically seen the pre-credits cold open. It could be a standalone short story, like the first 15 pages of Stephen King’s It. I give Passenger credit for not ultimately having a metaphor attached to it. It’s just a good old fashioned ghost story with no strings attached. The problem comes when we get the inevitable information dump about what’s been happening and why. The mystery is often more fun than knowing, and that’s why the first few minutes work as well as they do.

Passenger begins with two friends traveling on a back road at night. The driver is taken away while the other guy is in the woods, taking care of a biological need. Whatever is responsible for the abduction is now riding shotgun with the new driver, as he is attempting to get out of there. We cut to our main couple, Tyler and Maddie. He has just purchased a nice RV, and they have sold their apartment to live the nomad lifestyle. A vague line of dialogue (“My old boss says he’d love to have me back, and I can do the thing remotely now, and get a pay bump”) is tossed out to answer the cash flow question.

Maddie has already encountered strange goings on when the ominous title character pays them a visit. Her and Tyler’s activities on the road include a stop at a convention called Burning Van (clever). Melissa Leo plays an older experienced traveler who has literally been around the block a few times, and serves as the rules giver outer. Stay on familiar roads. Don’t drive at night, but if you do, whatever you do, don’t stop.

Director André Øvredal’s previous credit was 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which I liked quite a bit. He gets convincing performances with chemistry from his two stars Jacob Scipio (Bad Boys: Ride or Die, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) and Lou Llobell. He knows how to construct a great scene, as we see in the beginning. When their outdoor movie-watching at a campsite gets interrupted, he has Llobell use the projector as a flashlight to inspect the woods – as we see action from a classic black-and white film scan through the trees in search of the Passenger.

I was on the fence about whether or not to recommend Passenger. I just can’t. It gets too goofy by the end. The scariness was in never knowing when, or if, the thing would show up. We’re brought up to speed on what’s going on, and the Passenger looks so cheaply put together now that we get a good look at him. Tyler and Maddie prided themselves on taking every precaution for the final act, but somehow forgot to gas up, and find their home on wheels on E at the worst moment. The movie unfairly plays fast and loose with time and physics, when the blinking hazard light gets slower for no reason, so we can get a lame strobe effect of someone approaching. There were just a few too many horror tropes, and too much explanation. The journey is often more exciting than the destination, and I was reminded of that here.

Grade: C+