Buckle up because today we’re reviewing Passenger, the latest from Paramount Pictures. The film was directed by André Øvredal and written by T.W. Burgess and Zachary Donohue. The film stars Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell as Tyler and Maddie, two lovers leaving the big city and committing to van life. Unfortunately for Tyler and Maddie, a hitchhiking demon is not letting them live the van life alone.

Verdict

We like to give our verdict upfront so if you’re looking for just a quick recommendation, this is the review for you! 

Unfortunately, I can’t recommend this movie and Passenger gets a firm “hate” rating from me on the Heart-o-Meter. I saw the film at an early advanced screening, with a lot of free tickets given out to other people, and there was a lot of phone and watch checking going on. Not to respond to texts but to note the time, which is always a bad sign! 

If you want some more spoiler free thoughts about why I feel this way about the movie, let’s dig into that.

My Thoughts

My biggest issue honestly was the relationship story at the core of this movie. I’ve really ragged on the movie Abigail, and if you’re a long time listener of the Screen Love Affair Podcast, you’ll know that that’s a movie I pick on quite often because of the way it forces these serious beats in a movie that doesn’t really require them. This movie might be my new reference point for this though, because most of this film, which is supposed to be about a demon hitchhiker, is actually very serious. 

The relationship at the core of this movie is so prominent that I found it really hurt the pacing because I just never got to a point where I really cared enough about Maddie and Tyler to be invested in what happens to them in the film, let alone about their relationship and their problems. 

And I don’t mean to pick on the van life hippies, but they even forced serious themes about the van life thing into the film. They each explain how Tyler was raised in a home where maybe there was some abuse or at the very least that he didn’t have a good home life, while Maddie was a foster kid who constantly didn’t have a home. That leads to them having an argument about whether van life is good and how it’s his dream because of his trauma and it’s her nightmare because of her trauma. 

I understand functionally how this could be plausible, but I didn’t need this moment where we explored the deeper reasons for their disagreement about van life because it felt so forced and silly that I just felt like we were wasting time getting to the whole demon aspect of the film.

Speaking of the demon, we can’t talk about Passenger with talking about The Passenger. Of course this name is given to him in the film during one of those obligatory bad horror movie research sequences where we’re reading books and we’re Googling stuff and landing on these websites with the blood red fonts to exposit all the lore. On the design side, The Passenger is kind of generic and feels derivative of a lot of other demonic spirits we’ve seen in other films.

Functionally too, The Passenger barely felt like a threat. Two thirds of the kills in the movie happen in the cold open. There is very little in the way of horror sequences throughout the film and the movie itself doesn’t really reconcile with this either because it demonstrates that it can kill quickly and suddenly, but of course, because Maddie and Tyler are the main characters it just messes with them every once in a while. 

The kills themselves were not particularly great either, with only one standing out to me as even sort of memorable. 

I also want to talk quickly about the camera work here because there’s this part in the cold open where the camera rotates from inside the car and it’s a really effective shot that builds tension. Unfortunately, they clearly like that shot because they use it again later in the film in a parking lot. Unfortunately, the execution this time was significantly worse, whipping around way too fast so I couldn’t even see anything and instead of building tension, it just gave me a headache. I’m not a motion smoothing guy (please check if you have this enabled on your TV and disable it), but this shot almost needed it.

I mentioned the pacing a bit earlier, but it was way off in this movie. It felt much closer to two hours but it was only 94 minutes long. That’s a real problem and all the things we’ve talked about contribute to that pacing; Minimal spooky sequences, barely any kills, and lots of time devoted to the relationship between Maddie and Tyler.

Overall, this movie just felt like a really bad horror flick from the late 2000s or early 2010s and Paramount really dropped the ball releasing this a week after Obsession came out. 

If you’re reading this review because you’re considering a trip to the theater to go see a horror movie this weekend, go see Obsession instead.
Also, if you’ve already seen Obsession, be sure to check out our episode of the Screen Love Affair Podcast from earlier this week, where we dive right into the spoilers of all of the things going on in that movie!