Movie Review: Passenger

There may not have been a worse spot on the entire summer slate to release Passenger than this past weekend. Granted, a supernatural horror movie that heavily relies on the loud jump scare trope to provide jolts and boasts an inherently silly story about a demonic entity known as "The Passenger" (Joseph Lopez) who latches onto a young couple (Lou Llobell, Jacob Scipio) living out of their van after they had the audacity to pull over on the open road at night to offer assistance to someone (Miles Fowler) they witnessed get into a car accident wouldn't have been met with widespread praise if it had been slotted elsewhere on the calendar, but sandwiching it between the WOM-powered phenomenon that is Obsession and the buzzy feature adaptation of YouTube series Backrooms-which has drawn favorable early reactions from the critics who've seen it over the past couple of weeks and is pacing to obliterate the record for the biggest opening weekend in A24's history that's currently held by Civil War ($25.7 mil)- is inevitably going to maximize the scrutiny it receives. 

While I certainly understand where the detractors of Passenger are coming from, I will not be joining their disgruntled chrous as I walked out of the theater having had a good time with it. Seasoned horror filmmaker André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) punches up the predictable scare punchlines with some tense setpieces that are full of excellent camerawork that invoke the feeling of being completely disoriented from traveling nonstop (an extended sequence in the second act where Llobell's character is trying to find their van in a strip mall parking lot does a particularly good job of capturing this), there's a lingering atmosphere of dread present as the main characters navigate vast wide open spaces with the blind hope that they'll stumble upon a place that can provide them with some sort of safety from this serious supernatural threat and the lore surrounding "The Passenger" is made simple enough where it doesn't bog down the pacing of this efficient 94-minute ride with bloated exposition. Surrendering to the ridiculous baggage that Passenger is carrying with it is easy to do when it mostly succeeds in its primary goal of finding ways to be spooky. Part of the beauty of horror movies is that there's space for all sorts of different projects within it and in a month where the genre has commanded so much of the theatrical spotlight, I'm thrilled that flawed but entertaining studio horror flicks that will largely be forgotten within a few years of their release got some representation. 

Grade: B