‘Passenger’ Review: André Øvredal’s Van Life Haunted House Movie Does Exactly What You Expect and Maybe That’s All It Needs To Do [C+]

Sometimes it’s nice to show up at the cinema for a genre programmer that gives you exactly what you expect — a polished studio horror movie that doesn’t reach for the stars but thrives on its modest ambitions. Enter André Øvredal, the Norwegian horror filmmaker who broke through with his fantasy-horror mockumentary Troll Hunter and bump-in-the-night creeper The Autopsy of Jane Doe, before transitioning into a hired hand for high-profile genre projects. His subsequent work has been uneven: a solid adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a lackluster attempt to wrangle the boondoggle that was The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

With Passenger, Øvredal strips things back to basics. Working from a script by Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess, he finds a rejuvenated playground for crafting above-average frights within an exceedingly familiar template. He may still be punching below his weight on generic genre material, but the man knows how to put together an effectively creepy set-piece.

To the credit of Passenger’s script, it has a fun central idea: what if you made a haunted-house movie for the crunchy-granola van-life crowd? Couple Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) have just shed the shackles of their desk jobs for a life on the road, seemingly blissful in their newfound freedom. Driving the pitch-black back roads of middle America, they’re cut off by a speeding car whose driver appears to wave for help before disappearing. Further up the road, they find his car wrecked beyond survival. There’s also the strange man Maddie thinks she sees standing in the distance, before he suddenly vanishes.

From there, it’s the classic horror dynamic: one character convinced that something is wrong while the other insists everything is fine. Maddie keeps seeing the man from the crash site, appearing wherever she goes. A close encounter and a mounting pile of evidence push the story forward — scratch marks on the van that align with Hobo Code symbols for danger; a fellow traveler, Diana (Academy Award winner Melissa Leo), issuing an ominous warning against driving at night. The lore unfolds gradually: Maddie and Tyler are being pursued by a demonic entity known among van-living travelers as the Passenger (Joseph Lopez, whose hollowed features anchor the film’s spooky makeup and effects work).

Passenger plays out more or less as you’d expect from a studio haunted-house movie, just relocated from the false security of suburbia to the open road. Things move when they shouldn’t, lights burn out at inopportune moments, and tension builds as flashlights cut through the dark, threatening to expose the eerie visage of the demon that has latched onto our protagonists. The overarching familiarity is a threat to the film, as its novel twist on the formula risks dissolving into a generic slush of glossy horror imagery.

That said, Øvredal reliably squeezes every drop from the material. Working with cinematographer Federico Verardi — who shot the similarly dark, woods-set thriller Alone — he gets real mileage from the open-road setting, paradoxically transforming America’s highways into claustrophobic traps, corridors of asphalt with no escape. He’s at his best building slow, sustained dread, and Passenger is at its most eerie when the entity is kept at a distance or swallowed by shadow. Rather than a limitation, the film turns this to its advantage, forcing audiences to lean in and scan the frame for visual clues. The tricks of light and false shadows Øvredal builds into his compositions are frequently effective, leaving you genuinely unsure whether you saw what you think you did.

He also demonstrates a sharp understanding of seemingly simple camera setups that, in practice, require focused preparation and blocking rehearsals. Twice, he deploys a long-take 360-degree tracking shot: the first uneasily surveys the interior of a car where something sinister has occurred; the second follows Maddie through the parking lot of a 24-hour gym where the duo has camped for the night, the van inexplicably receding further and further each time she turns to investigate the footsteps stalking her. These sequences showcase Øvredal’s patience and his impish pleasure in controlling the audience’s gaze. He applies the same craft to the van-specific toolkit: hazard lights taunting in the dark, a dash cam capturing something it shouldn’t, the threat of being crushed while retrieving something from beneath a jacked-up car. The film knows its gimmick and uses the right tools.

Passenger feels more commonplace when selling the relationship between its thinly drawn characters, or when the Passenger attacks up close, his demon face recalling too many other workaday horror movies. By the time it builds to a compulsory climax hinging on a far-fetched scheme to kill the entity, the best material is clearly behind you. In a strong year for buzzy horror — sandwiched between Obsession and the upcoming Backrooms — Passenger‘s familiarity risks suffocating it among more innovative genre entries. But for viewers who like their studio frights straightforward, it’s a fun enough ride through well-traveled territory, like a highway where you already know the location of every rest stop.

Grade: C+

Paramount Pictures will release Passenger only in theaters on May 22.