Do we really need reminding, when far from home, not to stop our vehicles in out-of-the-way areas on nights when nobody’s around and even the moon has chosen to hide? Nevertheless, stepping up to drive home this vital public message for four-wheeled wanderers is the new horror film “Passenger” from director André Øvredal (“The Last Voyage of the Demeter”). Had it heeded a more malevolent sensibility than an instinct to overexplain, it might have been more ruthlessly effective at yucking our yum for road trips.
Stopping along the side of a road for a call of nature doesn’t turn out so well for the dudes in the prologue. Especially when, after one of them is brutally murdered, the other tries to drive away and his battered Honda repeatedly passes the same eerie figure, whose raggedy appearance in the glare of headlights — did a dive bar in 1934 just let out? — does nothing to suggest he’s a friendly bystander.
Who’s next? Our protagonists are beautiful young New York twosome Tyler (Jason Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell), who are about to become ex-New Yorkers, having shut down their urban lives for itinerant freedom in a burnt orange van. We sense that maybe this is his dream more than hers, but after he sweetly proposes, she starts warming to the romance of it all. Besides, they’re totem-protected: a goofy little Bob Ross bobble head for the dash — “No mistakes, just happy accidents,” Tyler reminds Maddie of the TV painter’s mantra — and a St. Christopher medallion hanging from the rearview mirror.
One night six weeks in, on a rain-slicked stretch of wooded two-lane, they’re nearly run off the road by that speeding Honda, which crashes ahead of them. Stopping out of concern, they realize this is no normal accident, seeing the eerie man in the distance who disappears in the flicker of their hazard lights. Later, at a festive nomad meet-up called Burning Van, a wall of missing persons and death notices unnerves Maddie, who is then warned by “van lifer” Diane (Melissa Leo) of the ancient evil awaiting highway rovers like them if they stop carelessly at night. But judging by the desiccated man-monster (Joseph Lopez) who attacks Maddie later in an empty parking lot, it’s a little too late for warnings.
Per usual with movies like this, spelling out the terror (the roots are in hobo codes and religious legend) becomes, regrettably, a shock absorber, not a facilitator. But the scares were middling to begin with because Øvredal — a game but overeager trickster — telegraphs his set pieces as if he were equipped with a flare gun and detour cones. Then again, it might be an attempt to distract us from thinking too hard about all the illogic in Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess’ screenplay.
There’s one enjoyably oddball visual when Passenger Man disrupts a cozy projector-and-canopy movie night in the forest and suddenly the faces of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn are on trees everywhere as mayhem ensues. But the rest of “Passenger,” which straps itself into a supernatural grandiosity when it should be looser, nastier and dread-filled, is a far cry from the halcyon days of open-road freakouts like “Duel” and “The Hitcher” or even — no kidding — “Lost in America.” It’s the genre equivalent of an airbag that deploys already half-deflated.
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