Director: André Øvredal
Stars: Lou Llobell, Jacob Scipio, Joseph Lopez
Since his 2010 breakout Troll Hunter, Norwegian born André Øvredal has shown an interest in how legends (urban or otherwise) and notions of horror intersect, with a stream of semi-successful mid-budget titles in and out of the studio system. Passenger, written by T.W. Burgess and Zachary Donahue, continues this line of interest. Øvredal shows how he has become a dab hand at a certain set of scare mechanics, and there’s some likeable character work, but the messaging is confused and contradictory and the whole let down by a sloppy third act.
The teaser trailer nabbed attention for zeroing in on just a single sequence, of eternal ‘bros’ Lucas (Miles Fowler) and Daniel (Alan Trong) falling foul of a mysterious lanky presence lurking on some anonymous American backroads at night. This amounts to the movie’s cold open, leaving us wide-open for the story that follows. It’s a bracing and effective way of booting us, uneasily, into the unknown and it’s one of Passenger‘s most economical and effective stretches.
After that we’re with Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) as they pack up their New York life and set out on the open road in a pumpkin-coloured van to get away from it all, in a dream of self-sufficient independence that might not last the distance. All seems fine until the pair’s travels intersect with that of Lucas from the opening, speeding from his tormentor and ultimately crashing on a similar stretch of woodland road. Maddie and Tyler are shaken from the encounter, but they take more away from it than they’d bargained for. This “highway man from hell” (Joseph Lopez) – gossiped about in online forums and dubbed ‘The Passenger’ – has latched onto them for stopping, and only Maddie’s miniscule St. Christopher pendant (the patron saint of travellers) seems to have any effect warding it off.
The latched-on curse is nothing new of course. The idea of becoming tainted through proximity is a fairly standard invocation of manifest trauma, and in modern horror movies can be seen – just of late – in the two popular Smile movies and way back to Hideo Nataka’s Ring and beyond. Mixing it in with the romanticism of the American road movie provides Passenger with a fresh angle that it manages to sustain for a while, particularly thanks to the appealing work from the two leads. While Tyler is typically skeptical of his partner when she first grows concerned that they’re being followed by an entity, he quickly comes around as a supportive believer, eschewing the need for the now-overfamiliar gaslighting detour. It also helps that Burgess and Donahue have a couple of neat set-piece ideas. An effective gag in a dimly lit car park folds neatly into notions of liminal horror currently rising in popularity. More original is the use of a projector as a light source at an isolated camping spot, casting Roman Holiday against the bodies of trees in search of our nasty antagonist, weaponising the movies themselves.
But consistency and originality isn’t Passenger‘s strong suit. Melissa Leo wanders out of Nomadland to offer cryptic warnings and a set of simple rules (don’t drive at night, stay on the main roads, don’t stop for anything) that the duo relentlessly ignore. And, worse than that, actively need to flout in order to prevail. Elsewhere, as intimated, we get the eye-rolling scenes (multiple) in which the characters try to Google their way to the movie’s lore. The Passenger’s box of tricks is left creepily amorphous, but seems to expand or contract at the film’s convenience, ultimately making ‘him’ seem as silly as his backstory.
And then there’s the confusion about what this piece is trying to tell us. St. Christopher and his charity for strangers becomes a beacon of hope in defeating The Passenger, but the film has to predicate the notion of fear in others. Once upon a time we only had to fear the lowly, untrustworthy hitchhiker. In the 21st century, it’s anyone and everything. Don’t Stop. Don’t Help. Stay In Your Lane. It’s perhaps representative of the pall of gloom that hangs over the US thanks to its present, regressive authority and the fear-mongering that’s come along with that. So maybe it’s just as well that Maddie and Tyler ignore anything that’s said to them and blunder chaotically through the movie’s that’ll-do conclusion (including the protection of geographically circumspect religious sites). When the inevitable credits song rushes in, it feels like a decidedly quick curtain call to usher us out before we’ve had a chance to collect ourselves and think about this muddle.
Still, on a basic level, this is a fun-enough ride pocked with scattered ingenuity and more inevitable, risible jump scares. Pop horror 101. Basic but serviceable, it’s likely to get overshadowed by the more notable and creative major genre releases that bracket it during the beginning of a busy summer season for the genre.
The Lost Highway Hotel 