A demon won’t take no for an answer in Andre Ovredal’s tense but confounding supernatural thriller.
Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) ditch life in New York City and hit the road to live the van life. Their plans get thwarted after they pass a gruesome accident scene and get trailed by the Passenger, a pasty-faced entity whose evil motives are murky, something to do with hobos and an aversion to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.
Ovredal is a shrewd horror maker with precision timing and no time for stillness. He and Federico Verardi, his cinematographer, really shine in an odd but visually thrilling scene — one of the bigger curveballs in recent horror — that comes after the Passenger almost kills Maddie in her van. Instead of driving her to the nearest hospital for psychiatric evaluation, Tyler sets up a makeshift theater in the woods so they can watch Gregory Peck woo Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday.”
When the Passenger interrupts their cuddling, Tyler uses the projector as a light source, casting Peck and Hepburn’s faces onto the trees — a strange interlude of experimental madness the likes of which Ovredal should have employed more frequently instead of relying on predictable (but mostly successful) jump scares.
Scipio and Llobell do a decent job keeping straight faces with the tangled script, written by Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess with ho-hum hints of “Jeepers Creepers” and other highway horror movies. Melissa Leo is squandered in a bit role as a kindly nomad.
Passenger Rated R for neck-snapping gore. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.
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