Passenger could have been a good movie. The bones are there, especially after a pretty great opening sequence. But there’s no meat on them. In fact, Passenger is as “unelevated” as a ghost story can get. The good news is that there are some sequences that totally work for it. The bad news is it feels like this movie has been chopped and edited to the bare bones, leaving it a shell of what it could have been. 

• Directed by: André Øvredal
• Written by: Zachary Donohue. T.W. Burgess
• Starring: Jacob Scipio. Lou Llobell. Melissa Leo

The Plot

The idea has a lot of promise: a young couple, Tyler and Maddie, trades apartment living for van life, only to be haunted by an entity after coming across an accident. There are plenty of jump scares and some great atmospheric scenes. 

So where does Passenger fall flat? There is a generic quality to the movie that has a lot to do with the lack of character development from the leads.  There is one really great scene with them watching Roman Holiday at night in the woods with a projector. Not only do they talk about how van life isn’t what they both wanted, the following scare is pretty decent.

The Characters

But these characters are fine enough, as is the lore they create around the demonic passenger haunting them. There are some internal inconsistencies around what the entity can and cannot do like what rules can be followed and who is a target. That’s standard mediocre horror movie stuff, so that didn’t really bother me.  I’ve never seen a demon with such strong plot armor, however. 

What bothered me is how thematically empty it was. A lot of things happen in this movie, and yet it’s about nothing. This is the big difference between good and bad horror, OR what we’ve come to think of as elevated horror. The worst thing for me is a wasted opportunity and unfortunately Passenger has plenty of them. 

The Theme

Thematically there is a lot that could have been going on here. Van life, as a concept, is full of themes a writer could pull from. They certainly hint at some of them, like the escape from responsibilities and “adult life”. There is also the disparity between people who are forced into transient life and those who choose it. There are some hints of those elements present, but it could have been so much more. Especially as the couple discovers that van life isn’t the ideal they imagined. 

If the ending of Passenger didn’t revolve so heavily around St. Christopher—patron saint of travelers—saving the day, I would suspect there is a longer, better cut of this out there. But as it includes the couple embracing the rules of the road, only to turn around and agree to stop traveling, it muddies the message a bit. 

What you really want the theme to be is “home is where you make it”. And you can’t escape life, you have to face it head on. It’s perfect for a road movie that contrasts different walks of life and our tendency to idealize other’s lifestyles.  Tyler contrasting an encounter with his van life hero, with people who had been living on the road for years, and then seeing new couples on their first trip would solidify all these elements and bring his journey full circle. 

As for Maddie, since she only wanted a stable life with Tyler, her arc is pretty solid. He proves that he’s a ride-or-die fiancé and they live happily ever after. It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by Lou Llobell from Foundation and a fantastic actress. 

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of worse movies out there, and to be honest, Passenger’s worst problem is that it’s cripplingly average. I didn’t dislike it, I just had higher expectations. If you want something that’s creepy enough and doesn’t require a ton of brain power, it’s not a bad watch. 

Passenger is streaming now.