Last Updated on May 26, 2026 by Amber T
The story of a young couple terrorized by an otherworldly force that attaches itself to their cross-country road trip, Passenger reminds you that ghost stories, like most horror movies, have a bag of tricks that’s long since been exhausted — but when they’re wielded by talented filmmakers, the sleight of hand can still feel genuinely dazzling.
Director André Øvredal, best known for The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, knows his way around genre boilerplate better than many of his contemporaries. Working from a script by Zachary Donohue (The Den) and newcomer T.W. Burgess, Øvredal assembles a gauntlet of scares that are guaranteed to stun audiences, even if actors Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell aren’t quite as successful generating emotions that linger after the loud noises conclude.
Scipio (Bad Boys: Ride or Die) and Llobell (Voyagers) play Tyler and Maddie, young lovers who throw their furniture into storage and trick out a sprinter van as a mobile residence. Tyler’s unhappy childhood inspired him to pursue an itinerant life, while Maddie’s made her want more permanent roots, so after six weeks Tyler’s marriage proposal cements their relationship while simultaneously exposing faults in its foundation. Before the couple is able to address the simmering divide in their needs, however, their travels are interrupted by a car accident where another driver dies brutally.
As they travel from one town to the next in search of roomy parking and lenient local law enforcement, Maddie begins experiencing strange visions of a longhaired man lurking in the shadows — and eventually, attacking her in their conveyance. Though Tyler is skeptical of what happened to her, she’s both validated and terrified after meeting Diana (Melissa Leo), a fellow van dweller who ominously warns the two of them about traveling at night and never, ever stopping.
Soon enough, Tyler witnesses a violent vision of his own and the two of them decide to seek out Diana for answers about who — or what — seems determined to torment them while they’re navigating the byways and back roads of the American heartland. But what they soon learn is that an entity colloquially named The Passenger has evolved from a ghost story from the earliest days of the national highway system into an unstoppable force of evil — and they have been designated its next victims.
Øvredal leads into the film’s title card with a pretty terrific jump scare — typically a four-letter word for critics who have had their eardrums rattled too many times by deafening sound design, but he builds up to it with a skillful, even masterful discipline. That he utilizes them a few more times threatens to test the audience’s patience; being startled isn’t the same as creating a genuinely frightening mood. But there are not one but two absolutely exceptional set pieces that more than evidence the filmmaker’s actual skill. The first takes place in a gym parking lot where the van seems to get further from Maddie no matter how frantically she tries to approach it, and the second at a campsite where Tyler sets up an impromptu screening of Roman Holiday as a way to alleviate their mounting anxieties.
In both cases, Øvredal technically does little more than dozens of movies about ghosts have done before, tweaking perspective and using seamless VFX magic to create mystery, distance and danger. But even if this feels like a film squarely manufactured for the popcorn crowd, he makes those experiences fun to watch unfold rather than infuriating. The characters may not quite be smart, but they seldom make stupid decisions, so viewers tingle with anticipation as, in the first case, Maddie tries to elude footsteps echoing behind her as she builds speed toward the van.
For the second, the filmmakers couldn’t have chosen better than to build a scene around one of distributor Paramount’s studio classics, William Wyler’s star-making Roman Holiday. But to use the video projector as a single source of light to try and ascertain the whereabouts of the Passenger, in the process splashing images of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck against the shadow-laden, arboreal backdrop is an impish stroke of genius. There’s also a baked-in reference to David Crononberg’s Videodrome that further underscores Øvredal’s mastery of the playbooks he’s drawing from.
As clever and likeable as its two lead performers are, I’m reluctant to suggest that Scipio and Llobell act their way into the horror victim hall of fame as Tyler and Maddie. Both maintain a suitably believable presence in the midst of being terrorized by a guy who looks like a decrepit Paul Raci (The Passenger is played not by the venerated Sing Sing star but character actor Joseph Lopez), but Llobell does a lot of chin-forward acting that would be better suited for a romantic comedy, and Scipio is almost too even tempered to navigate the unpredictability that the two of them encounter. Meanwhile, Oscar-winner Leo pinch-hits as the film’s craggy fount of expository backstory and she almost makes it seem like she’s not just in the role to pick up a paycheck.
Again, there’s very little here that audiences will not have seen in dozens, even hundreds of other films in which an entity whose identity overlaps with some arcane bit of cultural lore starts picking off beautiful young people. But sometimes horror can simply be scary and fun and not need to transgress the boundaries of art or human trauma, and that’s what this film does. Mind you, that’s not damning Øvredal’s latest with faint praise. The Passenger is trying to be a solid base hit and, one imagines if it earns enough, the start of a new franchise from the studio that brought moviegoers Friday the 13th, Paranormal Activity, Smile and A Quiet Place.
In a crowded landscape, it remains to be seen if the film will accomplish the latter task; in May alone, it’s competing with three other massively hyped horror films — Hokum, Obsession and Backrooms. But quite literally, Øvredal demonstrates with this film that running right at the most straightforward and obvious ideas is sometimes the best way to draw out the most delicious suspense. Originality certainly isn’t overrated, but it is the hardest sensation to achieve. The Passenger offers a terrific ride, directed by an expert driver.
