Released: 28th May
Seen: 12th August
Driving has become one of those things that everyone more or less needs to be able to do to be a significant part of society nowadays. Sure, you could theoretically get by on public transport and walking but everything is so far away and public transport is woefully underfunded in most places so as a general rule, you’re going to need to know how to drive. Because we spend so much time behind the wheel of a car it would make sense to have a horror movie where driving is a major element of the story, tap into some of those fears that come with the act of getting into a ton of steel on wheels and moving at 100 kms per hour alongside other tons of steel on wheels. There’s something naturally there that could make for quite the interesting film… or you could just do a fairly standard haunted house movie on wheels, that’s also an option available to you if you would like it and apparently that’s what Passenger went with.
Passenger follows a young couple who are part of the Van life subculture. Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) who are pretty new to the lifestyle and are just trying to get used to how people survive while living in their van. Things seem to be going OK until one night while driving they happen to stop right next to a car accident and then, the next morning, see three scratches along the side of their van in a shape that looks a little like claw marks going diagonally along the door of their vehicle. They soon learn this means they’ve been marked by a strange creature who latches onto people who break a fundamental rule, that being “Don’t drive at night and if you do, do not stop during the night for anything”, a rule that Tyler and Maddy have seemingly broken which causes the being known as the Passenger to haunt them… which is basically just making surprise appearances out of nowhere, making upsetting sounds and being generally threatening until it eventually gets bored and tries to actually kill them because that’s what ghosts do.
To give Passenger some credit, it is a pretty good-looking film. It has a lot of interesting visual ideas that it uses well, from lighting a scene almost entirely via a projector playing Roman Holiday (one of the more unnerving images from the film is in this scene) to moments where the key lighting is the red brake light of a vehicle which creates a sense of foreboding. The way the camera moves around in a scene and how it can build suspense just while driving along an empty highway is pretty impressive. Sure, some of the camera movements are a bit much, there’s a moment in the Roman Holiday scene where the camera just keeps swinging about trying to find the passenger ghost and it gets incredibly old really quickly but most of the time everything manages to be visually interesting and easy to follow.
It’s also kind of nice that the two lead characters, Tyler and Maddie, are mostly likable characters who actually trust each other. We don’t have to deal with that standard element where one of them keeps seeing weird things and the other one refuses to believe them until it’s too late, nope Passenger makes sure we can root for them both. Maddie might be the first one to actually see anything that suggests a haunting but Tyler believes her the second she tells him what’s going on, there is no dancing around the topic which is honestly the most unique thing this film has going for it. Sure it’d be nice if all the characters in the film were this smart or forthcoming but frankly, no one else in the film is even that much of an actual character because that would take too much originality and that’s not something that Passenger is willing to do.
Sadly for the most part, Passenger falls into every single trope you could imagine from a haunting movie. Appearing out of nowhere, loud bangs, flashing lights, things being slowly unscrewed like the ghost is trying to sneakily pull off a prank. If it exists in a haunted house movie, it happens here but it happens on two wheels. This means that really there is nothing here that’s going to be that surprising because we’ve seen it all before and you kind of know what to expect if you’ve seen even one of these movies. There are a few tiny elements that make for some interesting moments (Again, the Roman Holiday scene has probably Passenger’s best ideas in general) but most of it is just the same stuff you can see in about 20 other films that came out in the last year.
The one thing that’s undeniably original about Passenger is the central monster of the piece, the titular Passenger, and while the concept might be original it also gets very confusing very quickly. When they say “Don’t drive at night” how are they defining night? Are we talking full darkness or just after a certain time? Is it just going after people who are into van life, because the first two victims were just two guys in a regular car on a road trip, so who has to follow this rule? Does all nighttime driving from anyone around the world potentially result in demonic death? Is it just on one specific road or in one zip code and, if so, why not just not go near that specific area? How does it select its victims? Is it going after EVERYONE who breaks the ‘no stopping/no driving’ rule or are these just unlucky bastards? If it’s chasing you and the sun comes up, will the demon just vanish? I know this feels like questioning how the Mogwai rules from Gremlins work but unfortunately all of those questions and many more kept running through my head as this film went on which made it hard to really enjoy it because it made less sense the more you thought about it. At least the Gremlins were pretty straightforward and any extra questions were fun little afterthoughts that didn’t matter to the movie we were watching.
There’s also an unavoidable feeling of padding throughout; if Passenger can do the same scare 2-3 times in a row and get away with it, it’s going to do that just to make sure it hits the runtime. It kind of gets old after a while, especially for a film that repeatedly tells us that the way to survive is to not stop at night. It’s kind of impressive how many times the main characters stop at night without dying. It makes any sense of suspense harder to build because the rules of how this ghost is supposed to operate seem to barely be applied in any meaningful way. It’s hard to be scared of what’ll happen if they stop if these guys are stopping every 10 minutes and living to tell the tale. It feels like this might’ve been a lot better as a short, just compress it to maybe half the length and you would have something that’s a lot more effective but after a while it starts to get a little silly, up until the climax which is INCREDIBLY silly.
Passenger has a few ideas that aren’t the worst; there are some mildly original moments in here but it’s all overwhelmed with stuff we’ve seen a ton of times before in other haunted house movies and with some unintentionally silly moments that are all in a film that just doesn’t really have enough scares to really work for any audience. It tries, it certainly tries its hardest to get the audience to jump through the use of loud noises and sudden flashes of light but without enough tension leading up to those moments or unique spins on those scares, after a while it just stops working. It’s certainly not the worst car-based horror out there, but not being the worst doesn’t make for a good film.
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