PASSENGER (2026)

Studio:   Paramount Pictures
Director: Andre Ovredal
Writer:   Zachary Donohue, T.W. Burgess
Producer: Walter Hamada, Gary Dauberman
Stars:    Jacob Scipio, Lou Llobell, Melissa Leo, Joseph Lopez, Miles Fowler, Alan Trong

Review Score:

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Summary:

A couple living life on the road experiences supernatural terror when they become targets of an evil entity who haunts travelers.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Driving at night along a deserted road, Daniel stops his car so his friend Lucas Tedesco can relieve himself in nearby woods. When he returns to the vehicle, Lucas discovers three slash marks on the trunk, all of the doors open, and Daniel missing. Once Lucas gets behind the wheel, Daniel’s bloody body is thrown through the windshield. Seeing a strange man in the road, Lucas speeds away only to continue encountering the frightening figure, later revealed to be nicknamed “The Passenger,” until the man suddenly and inexplicably materializes inside the car.

Although she is uncertain about the lifestyle change, Maddie Brecker and her boyfriend Tyler Genocchio move out of their Brooklyn apartment to live life on the road in a furnished van. Prior to departing, Tyler hangs a St. Christopher medallion from the van’s rearview mirror for safe travels. Six weeks later, Tyler proposes to Maddie and Maddie accepts.

On an empty road at night, Lucas’s car suddenly speeds past the van. A short distance later, Maddie and Tyler see the other vehicle crashed into a tree. Lucas tries crawling out of the car, but Maddie sees him pulled back inside, even though no one else is visible. Lucas dies from his gruesome injuries. Maddie notices the three slash marks on his car’s trunk.

After speaking with police, Maddie and Tyler book a motel room for the night. Maddie is puzzled to find the van’s dashcam footage of the crash is corrupted. She and Tyler then wake the next morning to see three slash marks on the side of their van.

Maddie and Tyler attend Burning Van, a celebratory gathering for people who live on the road. While Tyler excitedly meets with “van life” influencer Brad Fuller, Maddie discovers all of the fruit in their van rotted. In the campsite, Maddie notices a bulletin board with many missing persons posters alongside a stick figure drawing with three slash marks.

A traveler named Diane Larson introduces herself to Maddie. Diane mentions she is on her way to Flagstaff to visit her sister’s seafood restaurant. Maddie asks about the difficulty of adjusting to van life. Diana becomes immediately uncomfortable upon noticing the slash marks on Maddie’s van, and she cryptically warns not to stop at night and to avoid quiet roads. Later, Tyler gets someone to buff out the slashes.

After showering at a gym, Maddie ventures across a parking lot to the van, which continues getting further away whenever she turns toward unsettling noises. Examining the dashcam footage again, this time Maddie sees the Passenger sitting next to Lucas. While seated in her van, a hand starts choking Maddie from behind. Maddie recognizes the Passenger reflected in the rearview. Using the St. Christopher medal hanging from the mirror, Maddie is able to repel the entity.

Tyler returns to the van. Maddie frantically explains that the figure from the dead man’s car just appeared in their van. Tyler finds the van empty, and the Passenger no longer appears in the dashcam footage.

Maddie obtains a “Haunted Highways” book at an antique store. A chapter on “The Hobo Code” identifies the three slash marks as a symbol for “not safe here.” Additional research later reveals the urban legend of the Passenger, a silent entity that can make people see things that aren’t there. Maddie and Tyler go back to their van to discover the slash marks have returned.

Maddie brings up her problem adjusting to Tyler’s van life dream while he projects a movie for them on a makeshift screen erected outdoors. The Passenger appears behind the screen before further frightening Maddie and Tyler back into their van.

Tyler and Maddie race to a diner to regroup. With Tyler now convinced something supernatural is haunting them, Maddie tells him about the hobo symbols and the Passenger’s urban legend. Tyler suggests getting rid of the van, but Maddie warns that the entity marked and latched onto them, not their vehicle.

Maddie suggests tracking down Diane in Flagstaff because she seemed to know more than she was willing to say about the Passenger. A flat tire forces Tyler and Maddie to stop on a deserted road. The Passenger pulls Maddie into the dark. Tyler injures his leg under the van while changing the tire. Tyler soon sets out in search of Maddie.

At another crash site, the Passenger briefly takes on the appearance of Tyler before paranormally possessing Maddie into kneeling on the road with her arms outstretched. Racing to the scene, Tyler nearly drives into Maddie, but they safely reunite.

Tyler and Maddie track down Diane at an RV campsite in Arizona. Diane nervously warns that the couple brought an unholy demon into their camp, endangering everyone there. Maddie desperately asks for help, but Diane refuses to get involved.

Maddie mentions she was able to hurt the entity with a St. Christopher medal. This prompts Diane to recall the story of a trucker who supposedly survived the Passenger by taking refuge in the remote St. Christopher Church outside of Grand Junction. Diane suggests leading the entity there to see if it can be killed, although she warns that the church is at the dead-end of an unmarked desert road that can only be found if someone knows what signs to look for. Diane reluctantly agrees to show Maddie and Tyler the way, but the Passenger soon appears in her van and tears apart Diane’s neck.

Tyler and Maddie purchase dozens of St. Christopher medals from a gas station for additional protection. Tyler’s research into St. Christopher uncovers the story of a demon St. Christopher encountered who took the appearance of a priest.

Day inexplicably becomes night as the Passenger’s ongoing haunting plagues Tyler and Maddie. Following hobo signs, Maddie locates the road to the church. She and Tyler drive through an illusion of dead bodies and abandoned cars to get there.

The Passenger supernaturally sucks all of the protective medals out of the van. The entity then attacks Tyler while Maddie continues driving. Tyler ends up thrown out of the vehicle.

Maddie slams on the brakes to launch the Passenger through the windshield and onto the ground outside. She then drives into the Passenger while speeding through the church’s wall, ultimately impaling the entity on a St. Christopher statue.

The Passenger’s body bursts into flames, setting the entire church on fire. Maddie escapes the blaze to reunite with Tyler outside. Maddie reveals the engagement ring was the only thing not lost in the fire. Tyler places it on Maddie’s finger.

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Review:

Tyler couldn’t possibly be more excited about quitting his job and giving up his possessions to live life on the road in a van. Sharing her boyfriend’s dream must have sounded like a good idea when she decided to make the same sacrifices, but Maddie has second thoughts now, although she does a much better job of sharing her true feelings with “Passenger’s” audience than she does with telling Tyler.

While packing up to move out of their Brooklyn apartment, Maddie stares wistfully at a “Home Sweet Home” welcome mat, one of the only items, along with Chekhov’s GPS tracker, that didn’t make it inside a box. Six weeks later, the couple camps in a residential neighborhood outside an ideal suburban home cheerily celebrating a child’s birthday. The view through the window gives Maddie another opportunity to look down with a frown as she contemplates the compromise she made about having a family. “Passenger” has to communicate her unfulfilled desires somehow, and this method is easy enough, though the stale delivery makes it difficult to see Maddie as a human rather than a fictional character working her way through standard film formula.

“Passenger” doesn’t always follow expected conventions, however. After Tyler proposes marriage, Maddie drives their van down a dark road at night while pensively fiddling with her new engagement ring, since she’s not yet ready to put it on her finger. On cue, she drops the diamond on the floorboard, and there’s no better time to reach for it than right as a speeding, swerving vehicle attempts to pass her on the rainy road.

Surprisingly, it’s not Maddie and Tyler’s van that crashes into a tree, which is what happens to distracted drivers in 99 out of 100 movies. It’s the other car, whose bloodied driver crawls out of the wreck only for an unseen presence to quickly pull him back in to finish him off. Whatever killed the man vanishes instantly, leaving just three suspicious slash marks carved into the car’s trunk. Whatever killed the man has now marked Tyler and Maddie too, which begins a highway haunting that terrifies the two of them with relatively tame supernatural shenanigans.

Of course, Maddie and Tyler won’t get too many details regarding what’s going on until Emmy and Oscar winner Melissa Leo reappears for the second of her two short scenes as “Old Lady Exposition,” and that won’t be until late in the last act. Until then, Maddie, Tyler, and “Passenger” viewers have to trudge their way through a scarcity of scares mostly made from moments like waving flashlights across dark objects, a lot of looking over one’s shoulder at shapes that quickly disappear, and an obsession with St. Christopher poised to make more than a few non-Catholics question the film’s oddly religious theme.

The titular villain essentially operates as an undefined stalker who merely looks like a run-of-the-mill vagrant, a counterintuitively amusing visage considering the movie’s repeated references to “hobos,” whenever “Passenger” grants a brief glimpse of him. He doesn’t speak. He barely has any backstory. He’s just an entity who upsets Maddie by doing things like making her van mysteriously jump further away whenever she turns her head during a tense trek through a parking lot. Sure, that’s a weird thing to happen, and undoubtedly disturbing for Maddie. But are spatial anomalies visually exciting or especially unsettling to a passive audience?

After breaking out with indie hits “Troll Hunter” and “The Autopsy of Jane Doe” (review here), Norwegian director Andre Ovredal fully cemented himself as a notable name in horror with “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” (review here). But Paramount’s “Passenger” follows on Universal’s “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” (review here) as a disappointing decline into bigger-budget titles that seemingly suffer from studio standardization. A common one-size-fits-all script furthers the feel of a “quota” project where no one involved had a burning urge to tell an amazing story or get particularly creative; it seems more like ordinary work to fill in a mandatory line on a corporate spreadsheet. “Passenger” fits the textbook definition of an average thriller, and from conception through to release, it doesn’t look like there was ever any plan for the movie to hit a higher mark.

Review Score: 50

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