SPOILERS: This film contains potential spoilers for “Passenger.”
I knew “Passenger,” the new horror movie from director André Øvredal, released May 22, was going to suffer when it began to lose me about halfway through the film.
The intro was the most compelling portion of the film. Opening on two friends driving on a wooded highway at night, they stop to pee and what starts as a quick detour becomes something more sinister when one disappears and one of them disappears.
Not only did the banter between the two friends feel realistic and funny, but the subsequent horror sequence was thrilling and had the best jump scare of the entire film.
But like many horror movies, such as the original “Scream,” the intro was a one-off to set the mood, having little relation to our main characters.
And boy, are the film’s main characters boring in comparison.
We are quickly introduced to Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), a couple moving out of the city to enjoy life on the open road. Along the way, they discover the crashed car from the intro scene which begins their encounters with an entity known as the Passenger.
The Passenger is a pale-faced monstrous man who appears first to Maddie and then Tyler, beginning as a menacing silhouette in the night. They learn that it is a demon that has latched onto them and is following them throughout their journey.
The film’s admittedly decent concept does pretty well in the film’s first half. A highlight for me was the scene in the gym parking lot where Maddie keeps being teleported away from the couples’ van every time she turns around when she hears footsteps.
I think this film could have worked had the strong horror elements from the first half persisted, but the characters and actors themselves didn’t sell me on the movie’s supernatural stakes.
Llobell’s Maddie felt stilted as she seemed to barely show any emotion, even when being dragged away by the Passenger (Joseph Lopez). And Scipio delivers the very average performance of the “mediocre boyfriend,” where seemingly the most he could do is shine a flashlight into the woods.
I wasn’t convinced that they even liked each other, much less loved each other enough to get engaged at the beginning. And even then, there were points where I swore they were going to break up, such as when Maddie told Tyler she didn’t like living in a van anymore.
So, if the film’s intention was to try to make me care about the couple or the possible future where one would have to live without the other, it immediately failed.
And the worst part is that these two are pretty much all we get.
Diana (Melissa Leo) is one of the only other characters we see and her time in the film is short lived. She first appears at the beginning at a van life meet-up where she gives Maddie a warning about never stopping at night while they were driving. She then makes another appearance at the end to give the couple a tip about an old church dedicated to St. Christopher that could help them, before she immediately gets killed by the Passenger.
Without any other characters to bounce off of, the two leads quickly got as stale as an open bag of Cheerios. There’s only so much of “scared couple changing a flat tire in the middle of night while a demon hunts them” that I can take.
St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, becomes a pretty big element in the film and its ending. Tyler has a St. Christopher medallion dangling from the van’s rearview mirror that Maddie uses to burn the Passenger when it first attacks her. Once they realize St. Christopher can help, they buy dozens of medallions from a gas station to place in the van.
There’s something called a setup and payoff in storytelling. When characters initially perform an action, that action is supposed to return a satisfying story moment later.
So, when Ty and Maddie bought dozens of St. Christopher medallions and hung them in their van, tell me why the Passenger just waves his hand and they all fly out the van door? The medallions literally do nothing, so the demon just ends up skewered on the staff of a St. Christopher statue at the end instead.
It was annoying to see the protagonists finally do something clever and unique only for it to not mean anything in the final confrontation.
Overall, “Passenger” just felt like whoever wrote the movie went into it without knowing how Tyler and Maddie were eventually going to kill their boogeyman. Instead, they just retroactively called it a demon so that church magic could kill it in the end, even though the Passenger didn’t even use traditional demon powers like possession.
If you see that your local theater is playing “Passenger,” keep driving, and don’t ever stop.
