‘Passenger’ Review: An Unremarkable Haunting Story with a Van-Life Twist
If you scroll social media for a bit, you’re bound to run across the van-life cult. Hordes of beautiful people advertise their perfect lives on the road across the Internet. What they often don’t show are the less-glamorous parts of van life: showering at 24-hour gyms, being harassed by neighborhood watch, or in the case of the film “Passenger,” being haunted by a demonic entity. “Passenger” is a horror film that has a really neat concept — there is a demon that makes you get into a car accident, and the next person that encounters the accident will be haunted until they reach the same fate. It’s a bit like “It Follows,” but with a vehicular spin. However, what begins as a gripping premise suffers from inconsistent mechanics, over-reliance on jump scares, and a flimsy plot.
“Passenger” has a phenomenal opening. The movie opens with two guys driving on a forest road exchanging banter. As one gets out to relieve himself, the other abruptly disappears with little noise. This sequence builds suspense through eerie silence as the lone man investigates his friend’s disappearance. Suddenly, the missing friend flies through the windshield, bloodied and battered. Horrified, the surviving friend drives away, until he sees a mysterious man in clerical attire on the side of the road, over and over again. Then, in a well-earned jump scare, the demon in priest’s clothes is in the passenger’s seat and the title card fades in. This is likely the best sequence in the whole movie. With a simple premise and masterful suspense, it could be a successful short story. However, with 90 minutes of run-time, it feels like there isn’t enough meat on the bones to warrant a feature-length film from this setup.
After the intro sequence, we meet the film’s two protagonists: Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell). The couple are moving out of the city and hitting the road as they plan on living out of their van and exploring what the nomadic life has to offer. After six weeks on the road, Tyler and Maddie get engaged in their van. Tyler says that if they can survive six weeks on the road, they can survive much more together. However, they would soon find out if that was truly the case. That evening, the two encounter a man driving erratically and then find his car in a wreck off the road. As they investigate the crash, Maddie sees several mysterious and alarming things: visions of something hurting the driver, a strange man in clerical attire lurking in the distance, and a marking on their van that matches a marking on the crashed car. By stopping, they had been marked by The Passenger (Joseph Lopez), and he wouldn’t let them stay on the roads for much longer.
