In any other year, Andre Ovredal’s Passenger would very probably be hailed as an outstanding horror road trip movie full of genuine tension, jump scares and a pervading sense of there’s something-in-the-dark creeping dread. Unfortunately, the film arrives in the wake of Damien McCarthy’s impressive Hokum and the genuine cultural phenomenon that is Curry Barker’s extraordinary Obsession. To compound the film’s problems, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms arrived in theatres the week after Passenger’s debut, and in a period where a new breed of horror movies is clearly busily reinventing the genre, there was always going to be at least one casualty that doesn’t quite make the grade. Sadly, Passenger looks set to take the hit.
But in truth Passenger isn’t a bad movie, just a badly-timed one and whilst its story of a young couple travelling across America in a camper van inadvertently attracting the attention of a demonic serial killer has its moments – several, in fact – it does have a whiff of ‘seen it all before’ about it and after the first two promising acts that crank up the fear factor, the last half-hour spirals out of control as the film hurtles towards an unconvincing and painfully-convenient climax. Following a creepy pre-credits sequence (you’ll have seen it in the film’s first trailer), we meet loved-up New Yorkers Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), who interrupt their open-ended road trip when a car crashes in the road ahead. They stop to investigate, unaware that in doing so they have acquired a new “passenger”, a supernatural killer who haunts, terrorises and eventually kills luckless travellers. They carry on their adventure, but soon Maddie is seeing images of the mysterious ‘passenger’, and in the film’s most hair-raising sequence, she is stalked across a parking lot at night as she makes their way back to their van.
Passenger loses momentum as it struggles towards the finishing line with garbled explanations for what the ‘passenger’ actually is – “He’s a highwayman from Hell!” gasps Melissa Leo’s Diane, a fellow road-tripper they meet early in their journey, at one point – and our heroes chance upon the way to rid themselves of their tormentor with a combination of extraordinary luck and staggeringly unlikely coincidence. But the film’s nicely put together, the lead performers are likeable, and whilst it doesn’t bring much new to the old trope of innocents terrorised by something nasty they cross paths with in the middle of nowhere, it’s broadly entertaining but doomed to be lost in a year of horror that has already gifted us some wonderfully original material.
Passenger is in cinemas now
