André Øvredal, Norwegian director behind Troll Hunter, Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Last Voyage of Demeter, created a little corner for himself in the American horror film scene with successful modest budget projects over the years. And his latest, Passenger, starring Lou Llobel and Jacob Scipio as a young couple in love, on the road together is a tight, surprisingly good horror film that has plenty of scares.
Tyler (Scipio) and Maddie (Llobel) are city folks embarking on a new life on the road in a bougie Mercedes van. Their whole lives are packed in the van and they are hitting the road. It's the opposite of Nomadland where people are living out of their vans out of economic necessity, but these young couples are what the Winnebago community in a trailer park calls "Air bnb on wheels" folks.
It's Tyler's idea of retiring early and being free on the road, but Maddie is not so sure. It is extra hard to object, when he puts a lot of effort into this new life and thinks their love will be the only thing that they need. The thing is, any way you cut it, they are an adorable couple and we don't want anything bad to happen to them. But things start happening.
While they are on the road, they witness the aftermath of a brutal car crash. Since then, Maddie is seeing a scary figure in the corner of her eyes. There are deep scratch marks on the side of the van, which they later find out that it's a warning sign in a hobo code to be on the lookout for danger.
Their road trip on Route 66 turns out to be less ideal than Tyler anticipated, but downright scary with this 'passenger' attaching itself to them.
The couple learns that the only way to lose this scary ghoul is driving to the creepy abandoned church of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, somewhere off the beaten path in the desert near Grand Junction,CO.
In Passenger, jump scares are plenty and tension building is top notch. Øvredal uses all the tricks in the scary road movie genre tropes - car engine stalling, flat tires in the middle of nowhere, scary parking spaces at night with unreliable, flickering street lights combined with supernatural elements, debunking the American romanticism of hitting the road.
