[Review]: Passenger

Andre Øvredal burst onto the horror directorial scene with his dark fantasy found footage Trollhunter (2010) and then continued to scare audiences cold with the haunting The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), followed by the luke warmly received Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2026). Three years on from his last release, he’s moved on from vampires hunting on the high seas, and turned his attention to ghostly hauntings on the highways with his new feature Passenger.

Starring Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio, Passenger follows newly engaged couple Maddie (Llobell) and Tyler (Scipio) as they trade in their urban New York apartment for nomadic van life, travelling cross country in their makeshift moving home. Already slightly unsure about the drastic lifestyle change, Maddie’s qualms are even more certified after stopping to help out a car crash victim late at night on a dark forest road. After receiving warnings about the dangers of the lifestyle from a stalwart of the mobile home life, Maddie and Tyler soon begin to be the victims of a dark and dangerous spectre, intent on causing the couple to detour onto the highway to hell. 

Utilising the inherent creepiness of the expanse that is the American road system that weaves its way around a country that is honestly far too big for its own good, Passenger heavily relies on its subject matter being a largely unknown and mysterious fact of American life. With tales of cryptids, roving serial killers and urban legends of travellers disappearing without a trace, a nomadic lifestyle is rife for the horror genre to exploit. Whilst Passenger does set up a good platform on which to explore these terrors that could possibly await roaming van dwellers, it never feels like it fully leans into the darkness that awaits victims on these isolated roads. 

Instead the film concentrates pretty hard on the relationship dynamic between the two main characters of Maddie and Tyler, and ends up feeling like a drama with a supernatural event occurring in the background. Øvredal, of course, shines when it comes to the mise-en-scene of a sequence, and knows how to create tension, especially when it comes to a certain scene in a forest uncannily utilising the profiles of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953) which results in one of the film’s more effective jump scares.

Passenger is a fairly run of the mill, popcorn-friendly horror, with a subject matter that whilst interesting in theory, in practice, it fails to produce anything other than a horror movie which is completely middle of the road when it comes to its plot and its scares.

2.5 Screams out of 5