A Road That Feels Familiar, With Some Real Scares

Read Time:7 Minute, 17 Second

MOVIE REVIEWS
Passenger
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Genre: Horror, Supernatural
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 34m
Director: André Øvredal
Writers: Zachary Donohue, T.W. Burgess
Cast: Jacob Scipio, Lou Llobell, Melissa Leo, Joseph Lopez, Miles Fowler, Alan Trong
Where to Watch: available now; order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: PASSENGER had me more interested in Tyler and Maddie’s van-life experiment than I expected, which is probably why I found myself wishing the movie had spent a little more time making them feel like real people before everything around them went bad. They’ve walked away from New York and the routine of just getting by, trading apartments and stability for a customized van and the promise of seeing where the road takes them. Six weeks later, some of that is already wearing thin, and the small fractures in their relationship give director André Øvredal more interesting ideas to work with than just two disposable characters driving toward an inevitable bad decision.

That decision really hits home when Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) come across a horrific accident and try to help. Their response is exactly the kind of thing most of us would hope we’d do, making what follows feel particularly cruel. Something unknown leaves the scene with them. The Passenger isn’t a threat that can be outrun. Once that realization sets in, the open road stops representing freedom and starts feeling like a collection of increasingly isolated places where nobody is coming to help.

Øvredal understands a change in perspective better than the screenplay does. PASSENGER is at its best when it lets the surroundings become part of the horror, whether that means a parking lot, a road stretching into darkness, or a place that should have people around feeling just a little too empty. One sequence plays with distance and orientation in a way that briefly makes you question what you’re seeing, and it’s easily one of the movie’s best. The effect is disorienting without turning into nonsense, putting us inside Maddie’s panic instead of simply pointing the camera at something scary and waiting for the jump.

There are several moments like that, which isn’t surprising coming from the director of THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE and SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK. Øvredal knows how long an empty part of the frame can remain empty before we start looking for something more out of it ourselves, and he knows when withholding something is more effective than showing it. PASSENGER has its share of jolts, gore, and familiar horror techniques. Its more memorable scares usually come from waiting for something to happen rather than the thing that eventually does.

The nighttime cinematography helps considerably. This is a movie built around headlights, parking-lot shadows, flashlights, passing vehicles, and whatever limited illumination might exist in the middle of nowhere. The darkness doesn’t simply hide the Passenger; it makes every space beyond Tyler and Maddie’s surroundings feel active. There’s an uneasy unpredictability to the road at night that the movie captures exceptionally well, especially once their van shifts from a symbol of their new life to something that no longer feels as safe as it did a few weeks earlier.

Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell have a believable enough relationship to carry most of this, and I appreciated that neither character is reduced to being the obvious rational one; horror especially makes that choice far too often, reducing characters to some pre-determined stereotypes. At the same time, the other makes every terrible choice possible. Tyler’s enthusiasm for their new lifestyle and Maddie’s increasing uncertainty create tension before anything supernatural enters the picture. Their performances sell the growing exhaustion and fear better than the screenplay does in developing the relationship itself. This gap becomes more noticeable as PASSENGER asks us to become invested in what happens to them.

That’s where the movie begins losing some of what Øvredal built. The Passenger himself is an effective presence, particularly when he’s allowed to remain something seen at a distance or caught where he shouldn’t be. Yet, the mythology surrounding him never becomes as interesting as the threat itself. I don’t need a horror movie to stop everything and explain its monster through some ancient book and ten minutes of exposition. There’s a difference between leaving something enigmatic and leaving it underdeveloped. PASSENGER occasionally feels like it has rules in mind that the screenplay hasn’t shown well enough for us to understand why certain things are happening.

Melissa Leo feels like someone capable of giving Tyler and Maddie a little more information about what they’re dealing with, and her presence gives those scenes some extra weight. The problem is that this part also exposes how thin the larger story is. There’s enough lore to keep events moving toward the next confrontation, but not enough to make the Passenger feel like the fully formed nightmare the movie wants him to become. I hate that I keep returning to that, but it really could have added so much more to the film itself.

That missing depth wouldn’t matter as much if Tyler and Maddie’s story continued developing alongside the horror. Their differing feelings about leaving their old lives behind initially give PASSENGER another reason to keep following along, only for much of that to become secondary once survival takes over. Horror obviously needs escalation, but the relationship conflict could’ve given the film more to hold on to as we followed along, rather than feeling like background information that served its purpose and was mostly left behind.

PASSENGER moves fast enough that these shortcomings don’t bury it. At roughly an hour and a half, there isn’t much wasted time once the threat attaches itself to the couple, and Øvredal keeps changing the rules and the world around them often enough that the movie never turns into the same chase repeated over and over. Roads, businesses, campsites, and other stops each offer distinct possibilities, which makes the movie feel more like a road trip film than a conventional haunting that happens to involve a van.

Watching a director pull off all these individual sequences so well within a story that never becomes a cohesive project is frustrating. PASSENGER has ideas and scares that stick with me much longer than its mythology, and the gap between the two becomes the movie in miniature. When Øvredal manipulates what we can see, where we think the threat is, or how much space there is around Tyler and Maddie, the movie works. When it has to explain what the Passenger is or make us care about anything beyond the immediate danger, there simply isn’t as much to work with.

That leaves PASSENGER in a strange but reasonably enjoyable middle ground. It’s too well-directed to dismiss as another disposable supernatural horror movie, while its characters and mythology aren’t developed enough for the whole thing to match its best moments. A few genuinely effective scares, strong atmosphere, and Øvredal’s control behind the camera make the trip worth every mile, even if the movie arrives at its destination without giving us quite enough reason to remember how we got there.

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