Passenger (15)

Tyler and fiancee Maddie take a road trip across America in search of adventure. A few weeks into their odyssey, the couple witness a fatal accident and they are pursued relentlessly by a demonic stalker. No matter how fast they drive away from the scene, The Passenger tracks them and this merciless phantom will not stop until he has Tyler and Maddie in his icy clutches.

LondonNet Film Review

Passenger (15) Film Review from LondonNet

If you were travelling down a deserted road at night and saw another vehicle ahead, pulled off to the side and its warnings lights flashing, would you slow down to offer help or drive on? Kindness kills in a supernatural horror directed by Norwegian filmmaker Andre Ovredal, who previously made Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. Passenger is a scary story shot largely under a cloak of darkness that unleashes a ghoulish otherworldly predator on anyone who chooses to assist a fellow traveller…

The film opens in nerve-shredding fashion with a car stopping on a night-time road to allow one man (Miles Fowler) to relieve himself in the woods. When he returns to the vehicle, the driver is missing. Cracking branches indicate something unseen in the gloom. The tragic aftermath of this comfort break is witnessed by Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and girlfriend Maddie (Lou Llobell), who have downsized from their city apartment to living in a customised van. A nomadic life is Tyler’s dream and Maddie is happy to support him. “If we survive six weeks on the road, we can survive anything!” he grins.

Alas, his positive outlook doesn’t reckon with a demonic stalker known as The Passenger (Joseph Lopez), who attaches himself to unwary drivers and signals his insidious presence with three parallel slashes in their paintwork. This merciless phantom haunts Tyler and Maddie and torments them regardless of how fast they drive away from the scene of the initial accident. During a pitstop, Maddie encounters long-term van dweller Diana (Melissa Leo). “People don’t take trips. Trips take people,” she remarks cryptically, close to a noticeboard of missing posters of couples who have vanished without a trace on similar grand adventures.

For 70 minutes, Passenger is an efficient exercise in escalating dread, punctuated by obligatory jump scares. Director Ovredal and cinematographer Federico Verardi steadily rotate the camera through 360 degrees around a stationary vehicle or character, waiting for someone or something to materialise. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes the eponymous boogeyman launches a stealth attack. Llobell and Scipio allow fear to slowly suffocate their lovebirds, who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Explosions of graphic violence bookmark the ill-fated road trip and gore is used sparingly.

Frustratingly, the resolution is clumsily executed. Screenwriters TW Burgess and Zachary Donohue choose one of their characters as a mouthpiece for important folkloric information about the Passenger. His grim history and a way to potentially vanquish the demon are hurriedly dispensed as a monologue that becomes laughable with each new morsel of trivia. Tension evaporates in a matter of seconds and a handbrake is applied permanently to suspension of disbelief. The wheels come off and Ovredal does not have any spares.

– Kim Hu