Joel on Film

The specter that haunts Passenger, which also goes by the name of the film in some cultures, is a rarity among recent supernatural beings in horror movies, in that he doesn’t really need to move in order to terrify either the characters or us. As played by Joseph Lopez in a thoroughly convincing piece of purely physical acting, the mere presence of “the Passenger” is enough to unsettle, and that, ultimately, is the greatest strength of director Andre Øvredal’s film. Sometimes, it’s quite enough that a horror movie produces a truly memorable threat to its protagonists, and here is an example of that in action.

There are a few other elements that Øvredal and screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess get right, though, that help to place this a cut above its contemporaries in this particular subgenre of horror. The first is that its pair of protagonists are a bit more complex than the ones with which we are typically saddled in a story like this one, which has otherwise been whittled down to the essentials. The second is that very quality of conciseness, because it indicates the smart assembly of the puzzle pieces.

It’s true that much of this is slightly undone by the film’s climax, but before we get there, a lot of worthwhile effort is put into the set-up and the subsequent build-up. A brief prologue tells us what we basically need to know: A couple buddies are on a nighttime drive through a dense forest, and neither of them survives a quick stop for one of them to relieve himself, on account of the ghastly being that immediately kills one friend and temporarily traps the other in an endless loop of seeing him on the side of a never-ending road. We learn a few of the legends surrounding this figure later in the story, but this introduction is truly all we need to be terrified by this figure.

As the actual protagonists of this story will quickly learn, the Passenger likes to play with his food before he eats it, and even though, by the sound of it, that seems to fall in line with every other supernatural entity, the meticulous work put into the tricks this one plays sets him quite apart. It’s refreshing to get a being like this, too, because the game often simply involves standing or sitting in a single spot and staring right at its prey, mostly to make them aware of the fact that he’s aware of them. Sure, Lopez provides a few good lunges at the camera, but the name of the game here is, appreciably and primarily, a bit of subtlety.

As for the heroes, they are Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), a dating couple who become engaged just before the start of their new journey as van-life nomads. It’s been a bucket-list item for the two of them, though Maddie, who moved through foster homes as a kid, does have doubts and insecurities she does not share with Tyler, who’s the product of a broken home. Both these actors are solid at giving us real characters before being put through the wringer.

Obviously, though, they are, first and foremost, the main characters of a supernatural horror movie and service the material quite well in that mode, as nighttime brings renewed terrorizing by the Passenger and the daytime a renewed desire to get as far along their journey as possible. Unluckily for them, this is a being who haunts the highways of America, becoming responsible for the many disappearances and mysterious deaths of hikers and long-distance drivers. Another nomad (played by Melissa Leo), who’s been at this for a couple decades, warns them of the potential dangers—but, of course, there’s only so much any of them can do.

As one can probably tell, there’s very little, actual depth to this story, which quickly becomes an excuse for sequences of suspense or horror. A few of these are genuinely inspired, such as how one pit stop to watch a movie on a portable projector reminds us of just how effectively they can be used as flashlights—before inserting a clever, dually layered image over another one as both the payoff to a scare and a little joke. The one that truly registers as something special, though, is a literally dizzying one-take in which the rotation of the camera and a certain spatial awareness come to disorientate a character simply walking across the parking lot of a 24-hour gym.

The climax is a lot less ambitious, as it forces the characters to outrun—but slowly—the Passenger and make it to the shelter of a kind of home base, at which point the filmmakers rather undermine this being with some inconsistent rules involving just how much a part of the physical world he is. A rickety climax isn’t too much to detract from the surprising success of Passenger, however, as a reasonably suspenseful and clever genre exercise.

Rating: *** (out of ****)