Passenger: Like Nomadland with Slasher Deaths and a Surplus of Jump-Scares

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C

Sure, Nomadland won all the big Oscars some years back. But just think how much better it would have been if it had a homicidal demon and a whole lot of slasher deaths.

The mediocre horror film Passenger takes a dagger to the idea of RV life, along the way overusing genre film tropes. By the time the movie is a half-hour old, Norwegian director André Øvredal (The Trollhunter, The Last Voyage of the Demeter) has given us more jump-scares, to decreasing effect, than any Blumhouse movie you could name.

RVers Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and their handy St. Christopher medal

Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) are a New York couple who have cashed in their possessions to buy a live-in van with a horn that plays the Hawaii Five-O theme. It’s more his dream than hers (“I think we’ve found your tribe,” she says, when they arrive at a Red State, line-dancing celebration called The Burning Van festival.)

But there’s a lot they don’t tell you in the travel guides or on Google Maps. Seems the roads thereabouts are haunted by an evil apparition called the Passenger (yes, a cover of the Iggy Pop song plays at some on-the-nose point in the movie).

He is, as RV veteran Diana (a sadly underused Melissa Leo) tells our two city mice, “the Highwayman from Hell!” As the nickname for a potential horror franchise centerpiece, it’s hardly a patch on Freddy Krueger’s “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” But frankly, there’s a lot of thought that didn’t go into the story of the Passenger.

What she does tell them is that you shouldn’t drive at night (gotcha, I wear glasses and the glare is terrible) and if you do, for God’s sake, don’t stop. It happens that Tyler and Maddie have done that very thing, stopping at an accident scene (crash courtesy of the Passenger, who hitched a ride when one of two bros stopped to take a leak).

So, there’s no origin story, just an angry entity who’s moved into their van and makes himself visible every so often to choke and/or slash. But happily – as often happens in by-the-numbers horror films – Maddie finds an old book about haunted highways in a curio shop, complete with arrays of old roadside “hobo” messages, all of which are warnings of one kind or another that Maddie doesn’t immediately share with her skeptical fiancé.

Ingenuity, a handy St. Christopher medal (which burns the Passenger the way a crucifix burns a vampire) and faded hand-sprayed hobo signage eventually do lead our couple to a God-blessed standoff with you-know-who.

As with The Last Voyage of the Demeter, I feel like Øvredal is a much better filmmaker than his films would suggest. There are moments of startlingly creative camerawork that mess with reality (including a scene in which, every time Maddie turns around in a parking lot, her van is farther away), and a spooky scene in the woods, lit by a projector playing Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.

But style doesn’t overcome lack of story. While it’s a welcome change of pace to have the psycho in a big-screen off-road horror story not turn out to be a local yokel, Passenger doesn’t replace that trope with anything convincing, or even scary.

Passenger. Written and directed by André Øvredal. Stars Lou Llobell, Jacob Scipio and Melissa Leo. Opens in theatres Friday, May 22.