Andre Øvredal has a real knack for highly contained horror premises – chamber dramas that never feel like filmed theatre. Both The Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Last Voyage of the Demeter took place in single locations, while the anthology style of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark created a similar sense of highly bounded narrative. From that perspective, he’s the ideal director for Passenger, whose screenplay, penned by Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess, reimagines Nomadland as a horror film. Following a terrifying prologue, in which a pair of friends, Daniel (Alan Trong) and Lucas (Miles Fowler), fall prey to a highway demon, we’re introduced to protagonists Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) as they set off on a cross-country road trip in Tyler’s van. When they reach the west coast Tyler proposes to Maddie, and while she loves him, she hesitates, since becoming his wife means embracing the nomad lifestyle that is his great driving passion in life. Before she can make up her mind either way though, the couple become haunted by the same demon that killed Daniel and Lucas – a supernatural entity that sometimes appears inside their van, and sometimes outside their van, perching us precipitously between agoraphobia and claustrophobia in ways that work wonderfully with Øvredal’s chambered aesthetic.
This sense of entrapment is further intensified by gestures in the direction of what might be called loop horror – recent films, such as Exit 8 and Backrooms, which situate characters in endless recursions of space that at once evoke the analog fantasy of being off grid, but also plays as virtual gamified realms, suggesting a traumatic collapse of physicality and digitality in the contemporary world. Marketing for the film leans heavily on this looped horror, focusing on a scene in which Daniel, one of the original pair of friends, sees the same hitchhiker (the Passenger) appearing repeatedly out his windscreen. However, the film proper quickly deflects this looping into the broader and more periodic appearance of the Passenger amongst a range of different roadsides and landscapes, while also condensing the loop aesthetic into the most striking signature of the film: slow 360-degree pans. The first of these occur when Daniel is looking around his car in the wake of Lucas’ disappearance, and from there they evoke the circumambient perception that is needed when driving a car, let alone when hiding from an entity inside a car, an entity that just may be inside the car. In one of the eeriest scenes of the film, Maddie makes her way across a carpark to the van, perpetually turning around at the sound of noises behind her, and then resuming her forwards gaze to find each time that the van has moved a couple of parking spaces away. This is where the 360-degree aesthetic is most unsettling, as Maddie desperately tries to find a way to look ahead and behind her at the same time, and from hereon the film often resorts to sudden shifts in what is ahead of and behind its characters, producing the choppy continuity you experience shifting between windscreen and rear vision mirror when driving.
Since the horror occurs at the threshold of the van, Passenger paints quite an evocative portrait of roadside America – specifically as it is experienced by transients, nomads, people who are passing through. Tyler and Maddie subsist on 24-hour gyms, cheap bric-a-brac stores, van meetups, Big Box carparks, and knowledge of which suburban neighbourhood watches are relatively relaxed about vans spending the night on residential streets. It’s in one of these many pitstops that Maddie comes across a book called Haunted Highways of America, and it’s in this book that she discovers the core of the film’s horror vision – the Hobo Code, developed by Depression-era drifters when the substrate of the highway system was being laid to help other transients know which places and people were safe and unsafe. The genius of the film is to transmute the Hobo Code into the horror lore of the Passenger, a figure that people can only see or know about if they’ve spent enough time on the road: “Ask anyone who has lived on the road long enough – they’ll tell you about him.” With nomad Diana Marsh, played by Melissa Leo, as interlocutor, Tyler and Maddie learn about one of the earliest urban legends in twentieth-century America, and perhaps the very moment at which urban legends emerge from folklore as a distinctively modern fable. For the legend of the Passenger comes with two distinct warnings, presumably born from a Depression-era economy of vagrant transit: “Don’t drive at night” and “Whatever you do, don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.” As Diana puts it, “people don’t take trips, trips take people.”
Øvredal is a terrific director, so this premise leads to some really powerful scenes, the best of which is a sequence in which Tyler hangs up a sheet in the woods and projects Roman Holiday, Maddie’s favourite film, only for the Passenger to appear behind the screen, slightly indenting his face into the fabric. Even eerier, when the electricity goes out, Tyler and Maddie use the projector to search for the Passenger in the woods, flickering distorted images of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn onto the void that has opened up around them. There are also some amazing jump scares that hit you with all the jarring volatility of waking up from a microsleep on the wrong side of the road. Nevertheless, the third act quickly runs out of steam, not only because the jump-scares quickly lose impact but because the screenplay can’t really decide what kind of horror it wants to be, and so eventually ends up with a mélange of the most generic ingredients, light years from the brutal austerity of the opening sequence, which feels more like a standalone short in retrospect. It doesn’t help, either that we see so much of the Passenger – by the end he just looks like a slightly more unkempt Iggy Pop, so it feels appropriate when “The Passenger” plays over the closing credits, part of an increasingly ironised tone that tacitly acknowledges that film’s loss of control over its vision by trying to reframe it as horror picaresque. For such a great premise, and such a great director, then, this was something of a disappointment, but still worth watching for its Hobo Code moments, and for those carpark and Roman Holiday scenes.