“Passenger” is a low-budget horror film whose distributor, Paramount Pictures, has chosen to release it with little promotion, on a weekend when most moviegoers’ attention will almost certainly be focused on a different title also opening this weekend. For savvier film buffs, this would suggest the film is a dog they were trying to dump out of embarrassment. Not the case here; “Passenger” is a fairly solid bit of genre craftwork that is a lot more impressive than its desultory release might suggest.
The film is part of the subgenre in which people set off on extended road trips, only to find themselves beset by all sorts of horrors along the way. It’s a concept that has fueled such titles as “Duel,” “The Hitcher,” “Joy Ride,” “Jeepers Creepers,” that one story in “Creepshow 2,” and the brilliant opening of “Twilight Zone: The Movie” that found Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks as travelers trying to scare each other while driving down a lonely road late at night. This film’s opening evokes that scene where a couple of guys are driving late at night when one of them has to answer the call of nature, and things soon take a messy turn. Although there isn’t anything particularly original or unique about the sequence, it’s staged with enough craft, care, and style to make me think there might be more to this one.
After that opening sequence, the story proper begins with young couple Tyler and Maddie (Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell) fleeing New York to live their lives together on the road, behind the wheel of their elaborately souped-up van. At first, both are thrilled with the adventure, but when the story catches up with them six weeks later, it becomes clear that Maddie is growing less enamored of sleeping in parking lots, showering in 24-hour gyms, and hanging out with fellow travelers at gatherings like Burning Van.
Before they can delve too deeply into that conflict, though, the two witness a gruesome one-car accident on a remote country road. While they aren’t able to save the driver, it soon becomes apparent that they have picked up something—a malevolent spirit (Joseph Lopez) that looks like the uglier cousin of the Tall Man from “Phantasm” and who, we eventually learn, latches on to hapless motorists and will not stop until they are dead.
Okay, so the basic premise of the screenplay by T.W. Burgess and Zachary Donohue won’t win any awards for creativity, and it doesn’t do a particularly great job of establishing the Passenger and the rules governing his existence. And yet, I didn’t really mind the lack of elaborate backstory here; this is not the kind of story that requires minutely detailed explanations for it to work—this is more on the level of the kind of quick-and-dirty narrative that you might hear around a campfire, hopefully by someone who really knows how to tell such a tale.
In this case, the storyteller is director André Øvredal, who has been quietly racking up a solid genre filmography over the last few years with such impressive works as “The Autopsy of Jane Doe,” “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” and “The Last Voyage of the Demeter.” Although “Passenger” may be a trashy B-horror item at heart, it never feels particularly low-rent, thanks to everything from the eye-catching cinematography by Federico Verardi (which nicely evokes the inherent menace of roadways in the dead of night) to the spirited central performances by Scipio and Llobell.
The legendary Howard Hawks once said that his definition of a good movie was one that contained three great scenes and no bad ones. By those standards, he would have approved of “Passenger”; there are no real clunkers on hand, and three key setpieces should impress even the most jaded horror fans. In one, Maddie walks through a giant parking lot late at night to get to the van and gradually begins to suspect it may not be as empty as it appears. In another—arguably the film’s high point—Tyler and Maddie have rigged up a screen to watch “Roman Holiday” in the woods when the Passenger turns up, and Maddie uses the still-running projector to try to get a bead on him. Then there’s the finale, which somehow manages to evoke the more hallucinatory images conjured by Italian horror master Lucio Fulci and, of all things, “Hawaii Five-0.”
These are the highlights, but there are a number of other well-executed moments throughout. Even when the film resorts to the inevitable jump scares, they actually work because a.) Øvredal knows how to pull such things off, and b.) he doesn’t go overboard with them.
“Passenger” may not have big stars or huge hype going for it, but I would cheerfully take it over most of its current competition at the multiplex. It is far more entertaining than “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” and in terms of generating actual suspense and legitimate jolts, it beats the absurdly overrated “Obsession” like the proverbial gong. Just because Paramount has decided that it isn’t worthy of your attention doesn’t mean that you have to play along. Let’s face it—horror fans tend to sit through a lot of crap in the hopes of coming across some unheralded gem that defies their expectations. “Passenger” is one of those films.
