‘Passenger’ Gets Mangled by Its Own Mechanics [Review]

There’s a universal anxiety living on the quiet country night road, and it’s one that’s been largely untapped by genre, at least in the specifics: the dark shoulder, headlights blinking a mile behind you, pitch dark stretches between streetlights which grow longer the further you get from home. Americana horror has always lived out there, from Duel to The Hitcher to Joy Ride. And Passenger clearly wants to pull up to that legacy, and for moments, it manages. But for the majority of the time, it’s mostly just a drag. 

Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell play Tyler and Maddie, a young couple downsizing their lives to live out of a van together. Early on, they pass a roadside incident and become “marked” by the Passenger (Joseph Lopez), an in-world folkloric evil who targets people on the road who break his rules. He toys with them. Then he kills them. 

The bones are there. A couple who has chosen rootlessness, who has made a lifestyle out of passing through, gets punished by an entity whose rules are built around that exact idea. And then fold in the deeper metaphorical themes of attachment and incompatibility. That’s a real movie, if done right. Unfortunately, Passenger never quite does.

What works is mostly in the direction. André Øvredal, of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Trollhunter, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, brings serious craftsmanship here, supported by cinematographer Federico Verardi and a score from horror veteran Christopher Young. Several set pieces are gorgeous, and occasionally, genuinely scary. The opening sequence is the best example of this: sustained, patient, and intense horror. One standout later sequence has Tyler and Maddie watching a movie projected on a fabric screen in the woods, with the projection beam itself becoming the source of some fairly fun scares. Through setting, tension, and style, Øvredal repeatedly raises the bar with striking remote-road-at-night aesthetics.