Passenger starts with a prayer. “Carry me safely to my destined place, like you carried Christ in your close embrace,” ends the prayer to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. It’s hard to say how seriously Tyler (Jacob Scipio) takes his faith, but he cherishes his sterling St. Christopher necklace. It’s a fitting keepsake. Tyler is clearing out the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Maddie (Lou Llobell), to move together into a van and live life on the great open road. Maddie teases Tyler when he hangs the necklace from their rearview mirror, putting her trust instead into a satellite GPS she keeps in her pocket. She won’t be laughing for long.
Passenger is the eighth feature from Norwegian journeyman André Øvredal, whose digital-heavy, horror-lite films — The Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Last Voyage of the Demeter — never quite manage to clear the uncanny valley with a wide enough margin to make a cultural or critical impact. Passenger keeps its ambitions modest: Tyler and Maddie’s haunted road trip spends miles in painfully generic character work and is littered with bump after bump of nerve-testing jump scares. But if Øvredal doesn’t manage to craft a particularly memorable story, he does prove his mettle with a serviceable, well-paced, and thrillingly scary popcorn flick. Sometimes, meat and potatoes are just what the night calls for.
Maddie and Tyler’s helltrip is presaged by a masterfully tense cold open. Two unnamed buddies (Miles Fowler and Alan Trong) drive late into the evening, chomping beef sticks and ribbing each other in order to stay awake. When they pull over for a pee break, one of the friends returns to an empty car, its horn blaring and three clawlike lines carved into its side. As the man scrambles to hatch a plan, his friend comes smashing through the windshield as if from the heavens, mangled and bloodied, barely able to eke out a “help” before he’s ripped away by the same mysterious force. The survivor takes off in the car, passing a strange, sullen man on the side of the road — once, then again, then again. By the time we’re ready to see this stranger for a fourth time, he appears stark and screaming inside the car with bowel-testing immediacy. Enter The Passenger.
Passenger’s prologue hits a thrilling high water mark the movie otherwise struggles to reach for most of its runtime, but it comes close in several inventive choices that supersede the criteria for its late-night streaming stock ambitions. As The Passenger gains traction on Maddie and Tyler, Maddie finds herself on a seemingly endless walk in a parking lot between a gym and their van. It’s a sequence rendered in a single shot, one in which Maddie’s paranoia melds with The Passenger’s capacity to alter space and time; combined with a bit of brilliant sound design from horror veteran Christopher Young, the scene is a welcome and thoroughly creepy standout from Passenger’s textbook peekaboo scare tactics. Later, in the film’s most striking visual stunt, The Passenger interrupts a makeshift drive-in screening of Roman Holiday. A distraught Maddie grabs the projector as a flashlight, and Gregory Peck’s and Audrey Hepburn’s silent faces illuminate the trees and bushes from which we expect The Passenger’s ghastly mug to spring. It’s a scene as beautiful as it is corny, one of the clearest examples of Passenger’s occasional nerve.
These sorts of inventions are a desperately needed salve to balance Maddie’s and Tyler’s milquetoast relationship. There’s nothing particularly offensive about Scipio’s and Llobell’s performances; nor is there anything particularly memorable. They’re the kind of conventionally attractive modern American composites that would be equally suited for a Chase Sapphire commercial, faces better resigned to sell lifestyle products than horror mythology. That’s not entirely the fault of the actors: even the conceit of two Brooklynites trading in the hustle and bustle of the city for #VanLife feels algorithmically composed, a GPT-coded streamline to get a vulnerable couple in the way of a hitchhiking demon.
The demon himself travels lightly. We learn precious little about The Passenger: at a meetup with fellow van lifers (called “Burning Van,” lol), Maddie finds an insignia that looks suspiciously similar to the claw marks The Passenger had left on the unnamed friends’ car — and later, Maddie’s and Tyler’s van. She’ll eventually find a book that explains those three marks stem from hobo code, telling wanders that the area ahead is not safe. Until then, a kind soul named Diana (Melissa Leo) warns Maddie of the eerie dangers of the road. Do not travel at night and stop for no one, she instructs Maddie. Those rules have already been broken.
Other than that, The Passenger’s origin remains a mystery. That opacity is a blessing and a curse. A glut of prequels and streaming slop have induced heavy origin-story fatigue, and it’s a relief to be spared the abuse that reduced an ancient hitchhiker into the hobo-demon wreaking havoc on American highways today. But without even an ounce of mythos under his belt, The Passenger’s horror is limited to a litany of jump scares and wretched character design — both of which succeed with aplomb, both of which wear on one’s nerves by the third act. In a movie with such a tenuous grasp on any sort of depth, it’s hard not to want a bit more from an otherwise terrifying villain.
Still, at a brisk 94 minutes, shallow design isn’t quite enough to sink Passenger. Øvredal’s movie is nothing if not efficient; by the time any limp dialogue or conventional character design becomes grating, it pivots aggressively to its next scare — almost always effective, occasionally brilliant. Which seems to be Passenger’s M.O.: conceding that not every horror film can be Rosemary’s Baby accepts a low ceiling, but the movie fills the need for a good, scary time. You could do worse for cheap thrills.
DIRECTOR: André Øvredal; CAST: Lou Llobell, Jacob Scipio, Melissa Leo, Joseph Lopez; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Pictures; IN THEATERS: May 22; RUNTIME: Melissa
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