If you’ve ever felt a shiver run down your spine when driving through the night, cooped up in your car, then Passenger may well be the horror movie for you.
It’s the story of newly-engaged couple Maddie and Tyler and their first forays into a life spent on the road. They’ve left the city behind and made their bright orange campervan, Pumpkin, their new home. Outdoorsy Ty is living the dream – Maddie not so much. Things soon turn nightmarish all the same when they stumble across a crashed car, its driver sprawled dead on the wheel and its side seemingly marked by one huge claw.
What caused the crash? And why has Pumpkin been marked in the same way, too? The answer lies somewhere out on the twisting highways ahead of them.
The film begins with what ought to be a tense sequence starring a character called Lucas (always slightly irksome – I hate people in movies having the same name as me, it’s just confusing) but given that this was the basis of the film’s trailer – an extended teaser rather than a montage – avid cinemagoers may well know what’s coming.
‘Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. People don’t take trips. Trips take people.’
While that foreknowledge is limited to the opening few minutes, there is an air of predictability to some parts of Passenger. I often had an idea of the scares that scenes were leading to, but I was really surprised by how little that hindered the overall experience.
If anything, there was actually a lot of fun to be had in seeing its ideas come to fruition. They’re well executed and I was happy to find myself smiling as certain moments played out.
The film’s helmed by Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal, whose previous credits include The Autopsy of Jane Doe and partial Dracula adaptation The Last Voyage of the Demeter. This is the first of his films that I’ve seen, but after this, I’d be interested to take a look at his others, because his work on Passenger highlights a strong understanding of how to build tension in simple, understated ways.
One scene, for example, utilises the eerie pale light of a black and white film projected into the woods in the dead of night. Another uses a flashing red light and extreme close-up on Maddie’s face to create brief, grey after-images in your retina that reminded me of the brief shots of Pazuzu in The Exorcist, which (unlike Lee Cronin’s recent horror outing with The Mummy) is cited well here.
They say sailors never really fall in love with the sea; they just get more wary of it with time. I wouldn’t call myself a sailor but I was a scout for about seven years – plenty of time to feel a bit of unease in the woods and the wilderness. Øvredal uses his environments to great effect, be it the vast expanses of the film’s roadsides or the space (or lack thereof) within the couples’ van. It’s cosy at first – decked out with fairy lights and a Bob Ross bobble head – but it’s claustrophobic as anything before long, as if something’s waiting for you just over your shoulder.
I love a good ‘road trip gone wrong’ movie and when the story leads to stopovers in the warm glow of a classic American diner or the safety in numbers of a campsite, things feel like Spielberg’s Duel (something of an urtext in this sub-genre) in a really good way.
An urban legend passed along the road from traveller to traveller, the film’s creeping force of evil has a knack for blending into dark places, challenging us as the audience to try and spot it before the characters do. I love anything that plays on the way that our brain works – the pareidolia that has us trying to find faces and figures where there are none – and Passenger has this in spades, to my delight.
It’s almost like a game within the movie itself, which helps to keep things engaging. The subtle yet immersive score and blissfully brief runtime help with this too, with the film clocking in at just 94 minutes.
While things threaten to run away with themselves ever so slightly in the third act, some parts of the resolution feeling rather over-telegraphed (perhaps for the ‘second screener’ audience that’ll latch onto this when it hits streaming). There’s still enough thrills and strong moments to stop the wheels falling off. The credits roll mere minutes after, so there’s little time for the ending to peter out before we’re swept away by a final, nicely chosen needle drop and arrive at our final destination.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong violence, gore, horror, language.
Passenger is in cinemas now.
