‘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.
Story-wise, though, the film treads familiar ground without finding anything original to do with it. And to be clear, I have nothing against horror films that are mechanics-driven, set-piece-driven, or built on established in-world rules. I have a real soft spot for that early-2000s mechanical strain: Stay Alive, Wes Craven Presents: They, Darkness Falls. Passenger swerves for those same lanes, but never quite finds its balance.
And those same mechanics are part of the problem here. The Passenger has rules. Don’t stop for someone on the side of the road, for instance. But the film offers no real reasoning or intention behind them. A pulpy, rule-driven horror film can work well, but the rules here aren’t effective or purposeful enough to carry the emotional engine, which barely exists to begin with. A movie about the ethics of passing through and the sting of romantic incompatibility needs rules and layers that stand for something. These don’t.
The film also feels dated in its structure. Its set pieces don’t build into one another so much as announce themselves, play out, and clear the stage for the next one. At times, the transitions have the clunky rhythm of school-play changeovers: lights down, scenery moved, next scene begins. That stop-start quality keeps the film from gathering the momentum its premise badly needs.
The antagonist himself doesn’t help. The Passenger struggles to hold the menace the film needs from him. In silhouette and at a distance, he works. Up close, he becomes a ghoulish, post-Longlegs presence. The design wants to evoke something archetypal and lands closer to goofy and derivative.
And then there’s the religious horror, which lands flat in a way that puzzled me throughout. It doesn’t feel organic to the plot, and it definitely doesn’t feel organic to the road-folklore register the film is otherwise working in. American road horror has its own mythology: hitchhikers, ghost trucks, and sure, even devils at the crossroads. Passenger has all of that available to it and reaches instead for a Catholic register that has little to do with anything onscreen. Given the financial success of religious horror in recent years, I’m suspicious that this element was bolted on to broaden the film’s appeal.
By the end of its road, Passenger feels haunted by the better film it could have been. The pieces are there. The film around them isn’t quite.
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Passenger
Summary
While ‘Passenger’ offers some striking aesthetics, a clumsy emotional engine and forced religious themes leave its horror DOA.
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