Even if Passenger (now on VOD platforms like Prime Video) was a passable horror movie (which it mostly isn’t), it might be a tough sell. Consider the context: It arrives smack in the middle of a genre renaissance where first-time feature directors turn their YouTube skillz into innovative filmmaking — namely, Obsession and Backrooms — and end up grossing more theatrical dollars than the newest Star Wars movie. And so this bog-standard jump-scareathon from director Andre Ovredal (do I have to mention his 2023 snoozer The Last Voyage of the Demeter?) just doesn’t inspire much in the way of superlatives, but I can at least confirm it exists. Barely.
PASSENGER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Two bros in a car. Long stretch of road. Through the woods. At night. NBD if you stop for a roadside pee, since nobody else is out there. BUT WHAT IF THERE IS. SOMEBODY. OUT THERE. AND THEY’RE DOING MORE THAN JUST WATCH THE GUY WHIZ. Well, bro no. 1 who’s going no. 1 hears the horn blare and when he gets back to the car bro no. 2 is nowhere to be found — until someone/something throws him through the windshield. There’s a creepy guy with straggly hair in the not-too-far-off distance who tends to disappear and reappear with what’s best described as random malevolence. Bro no. 1 tries to speed away but Mr. Stragglehair blips into existence in the passenger seat and then BAM we get the title card: PASSENGER.
Now we’re in Brooklyn, where Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Ty (Jacob Scipio) are moving their last box of belongings out of their apartment. I was about to nitpick that the floor is way, way too clean for moving day, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that if it wasn’t eat-offable, they’d lose their security deposit. This is the last benefit of any doubts I’ll offer them from here on out, though. It’s been Ty’s dream to live the Hashtag Van Life. You know, pack the Econoline — although Ty got an orange Mercedes that looks like it cost a buck-and-a-half at least, and is soon labeled an “AirBnB on wheels” — with only what you need and hit the road for weeks or months or years or forever, which leaves Maddie a bit uncertain about all this, but she goes with it. She loves the guy. And he hangs a St. Christopher pendant on the rearview and gives her a little Bob Ross bobblehead for the dash. “No mistakes, just happy accidents,” she recites in what is almost sure to be ironic foreshadowing.
SIX WEEKS LATER. Things are going smashingly. Ty is happy and Maddie is almost there but not feeling settled in, something presented to us via the movie’s annoyingly haphazard manner of developing characters. He smooths it over by whipping out a ring. She accepts and they move on, ending up on that same stretch of desolate wooded road as the bros in the cold open. And whaddayaknow, bro no. 1 who went no. 1 is pretty much going no. 2 as he recklessly zooms by the van with Scragglehair in the car with him. Bro crashes and Ty and Maddie call the cops and she thinks she sees something — hint: it’s Scragglehair — but nothing comes of it for now.
So they make their way to the Burning Van gathering of cross-country vanpeople, where Maddie spots three scratches on the side of the van WHICH IS NOTHING DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT. She eyes a bulletin board full of missing people and meets Diana (Melissa Leo), a lifer of a hashtag vanlifer who widens her eyes and tells our protag, “People don’t take trips, trips take people.” You know, in movies like this, there’s always someone who widens their eyes and makes declarations of Ominous Portent. And remember, in movies like this, there is no other type of portent.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Passenger is essentially The Amityville Nomadland. (And Hallow Road does more interesting things with a similar roadside-at-night supernatural-horror concept.)
Performance Worth Watching: I regret the implication that anything in Passenger is “worth watching.”
Sex And Skin: Nah. The van is never rockin’.
Our Take: You know what they say: Any movie that invokes the Hobo Code automatically sucks gila monster nards. And Passenger invokes the Hobo Code REAL HARD. See, the three clawlike scratches mark Maddie and Ty as people who need to be f—ed with for no decent reason. It could be because they’re yuppie-ass tourists encroaching on a lifestyle not typically populated by soft-ass people who we never see shit in a bucket like Frances McDormand did rather infamously in Nomadland. I never even saw a bucket in their luxury vehicle. But they did pack a projector so they can watch movies on a sheet in the middle of the woods, therefore contriving one of the film’s countless sequences that consist of slack-of-jaw people drooling their way stupidly through a series of jump scares. I mean, what’s a generically malevolent supernatural entity going to do with a lousy bucket? Jump out of it? That’s even dumber and lamer than the dumb and lame jump scares it perpetrates dozens of times in this lousy movie.
Such is Passenger’s only move: the quick cut to Scragglehair’s gnarly face, suddenly there, where it wasn’t a millisecond before. To be fair, Ovredal’s direction ain’t half bad, especially in a sequence where Maddie finds herself deep in the gooey soup of paranoia as she navigates a strip mall parking lot late at night. Yet it’s hard to be enthused by a movie whose most invigorating sequence is lit by the glowing sign of a Big Lots location. And that’s the film’s most effective symbolism, because this factory-second of a movie belongs on a Big Lots shelf, trying to convince us that 15 percent off manufacturer’s suggested retail price is a screaming deal. So to speak, that is. This is a barely written, deeply uninspired movie that awkwardly stirs the exquisitely dull domestic drama of Maddie and Ty’s life on the road into a bland supernatural-horror scenario. McDormand and her dump bucket were far, far scarier.
Our Call: I do have to say Passenger boasts the gnarliest shin scrape in cinema history – but that might not be a selling point, either. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.