Reviews have gone down a strange road as of late. Something is either a seismic genre-shifting piece of art or a complete waste of time that should be shunned for making us interact with it.
In the past few years alone, horror has been reinvented or redefined a few dozen times. Shelby Oaks became the scariest movie of the 21st century (it’s not, but it can be scary), Talk to Me changed the way we make movies about haunted objects (it didn’t), and Longlegs became an instant crime horror classic (okay, this one’s deserved).
Somehow, we’ve lost the middle. Sometimes, all we need is a well-made vampire movie or haunted house story that plays the greatest hits just right.
This is the spot where André Øvredal’s Passenger comfortably sits in. It’s a movie that manages to do something that’s already hard to pull off: entertain. A scary demon, reliable pacing, and a strong finale is all it needed to achieve that.
Passenger follows Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), a couple that decide to give up life in Brooklyn for a life on the road. They get an RV, turn it into their new home, and drive. Along the way, they come across a gruesome car crash. Maddie sees three strange long scratches on the car they came upon.
Shortly after, Maddie starts suspecting that something decided to hitch a ride with them when they stopped at the scene. Things quickly escalate from there as the demonic entity ramps up the violence the longer the ride gets, as if it were enjoying it.
The movie has a great demon in the form of the Passenger (played by Joseph Lopez). It’s an unholy thing that is not afraid to lean into blasphemy. Its design is simple and more terrifying because of it. He’s basically a corpse dressed as a priest with longish grey hair and a gruesome face. A broken smile hangs over his face most of the time, revealing the absolute pleasure he gets from haunting his victims.
If fans obsess over the Passenger aggressively enough, it has the potential to be the kind of monster franchises are built on. It possesses a strong silhouette and a classically-inclined sense of terror, the kind that made B-list monsters such as the Street Schizo from Prince of Darkness (played by Alice Cooper) and the Scarecrow from the 1981 TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow so beloved by fans.
Every time the Passenger is around, torturing Maddie and Tyler, the movie’s great. Øvredal proves to be highly skilled at producing a terrifying image, and he’s not afraid to get creative with jump scares. There’s a scene involving a movie projector that leads to one of the creepiest horror images I’ve seen in a while.
Those who’ve seen Øvredal’s previous films, namely The Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Last Voyage of The Demeter, already know he’s one of the most visually fascinating directors working in the genre today. Passenger further cements that, driving up anticipation for whichever project he decides to settle on next.
Unfortunately, the movie does stumble in the script department. Screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess forgot to make Maddie and Tyler interesting enough to really care for them that much up to the point where the bad stuff starts happening. Commitment issues are shoehorned in along with religious themes that never fully blossom.
The biggest letdown is the wasted potential of the RV culture/life on the road component of the story. Maddie and Tyler jump from RV campsite to RV campsite on their journey, giving viewers a look at what that type of lifestyle entails. This is where Maddie meets a woman that sheds some light on the thing that hitched a ride with them. She’s played well enough by Melissa Leo, but she’s mostly a vehicle for exposition.
There are also some key bits of hobo history attached to the mystery behind the Passenger that could’ve really shined had they been given the time to influence the couple’s attempts at getting rid of their demonic backseat rider.
In a sense, the bones of a truly great horror movie were there. Sadly, they got lost in the movie’s insistence on sticking too close to traditional conventions. Maybe it’s time we put other types of characters in leading spots. Passenger would’ve been better served by more inquisitive characters that were eager to dive deeper into the demon’s legends of the road.
Complaints aside, Passenger still manages to ramp up the horror at the right moments to guarantee entertainment. The demon is a true highlight that could end up in a sequel or as a collectible action figure in shops everywhere in the near future. The movie might not mark a watershed moment in horror, but it doesn’t have to. Scaring people into keeping a closer eye on the road at night for fear of picking up an unwanted guest is more than enough.
