Road-trip horror Passenger features solid scares and likeable leads, however this highway to hell frustratingly pumps the brakes as an impactful religious horror movie.
Those of us who get sucked into the YouTube blackhole of “disturbing dashcam videos” know that watching travellers’ journey the open road at night can be a scary viewing experience. Passenger doesn’t quite replicate the anxiety driven WTF tension that such content conjures, yet the Andre Ovredal (Dracula: The Last Voyage) supernatural thriller does enough to deliver an engaging, albeit surface-level horror movie.
Passenger focuses on Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), a newly engaged couple who trade in their stuffy urban existence in Brooklyn for life of the open road. While driving their van on an isolated road one dark cold night, the pair stop to help a man fatally wounded in a car wreck. Their act of Samaritanism, however, results in picking-up an unwanted passenger in the form of a demonic spirit (Joseph Lopez) whose sole aim is to make roadkill of his victims, with Maddie and Tyler next on his list.
Ovredal along with writers T.W. Burgess and Zachary Donohue (The Den) have delivered in Passenger something akin to a “Conjuring Vacation”, with the horror filmmaking built on suspense-inducing set-up and jump-scare finish that, while formulaic, does achieve its desired goal.
Llobell and Scipiop deliver likeable performances as a couple who have reached a crossroads in their relationship while garnering miles under their belt, with the pair given the right amount of tangible personality characteristics – Maddie an army-brat seeking a permanent home; Tyler seeking the freedom of the open road to escape a past trauma – to make them a couple worth taking this ride with.
Where Passenger proves to be a gas-tank half-full is in the lack of spiritual conviction from these characters during the films’ underwhelming third act. Ovredal presents a mythology to explain the films’ horrors (and the antagonist who creates them) by blending open-road folklore and Catholic theology. Passenger begins with the prayer of Saint Christopher (the patron saint of travellers) on a title card yet not once do his character say the prayer themselves nor display any other form of religious observance, even though their third-wheel spectre is weakened by such Catholic prayer and iconography ala Dracula.
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It’s a repetitive trait for Overdal who also had a ho-hum attitude regarding the power of Christianity against supernatural evil in his previous film Dracula: The Last Voyage. Passenger does portray Saint Christopher as a force for good, however Ovredal undersells the potential spiritual/religious impact and revelation that should have further formed the character of his protagonists.
As a horror-film with strong religious-horror elements Passenger is solid in entertainment yet shallow in depth; a road-trip horror that will take you on a journey to an underwhelming destination.
