Every famous horror monster has their own thing. Freddy Krueger kills you in your dreams. Jigsaw sticks you in elaborate deathtraps. The dead kid from “The Ring” makes pretentious experimental shorts. But underneath their superficial gimmickry, the best movie monsters hit us on a fundamental level. Freddy is a living nightmare, and we all have nightmares. Jigsaw asks how much pain you would endure just to stay alive, which calls into question our very will to live — and that’s a primal concept worth exploring.
The boogeyman of André Øvredal’s “Passenger” is, I think, not destined to become one of those greats. He’s basically “The Hitcher” if the Hitcher was a ghost but a lot less scary, and significantly less prolific. If you stop by the side of the road after the Passenger causes a car crash, the Passenger attaches itself to your car and screws with you on the highway. But only at night. And his kryptonite is St. Christopher medallions, which you can purchase by the dozen at any gas station. And he wears clerical attire, because there’s an obscure story that explains why he wears clerical attire, not because it makes any sense for the hitchhiking theme.
You can’t really ding him for the clothes — Freddy wears an ugly Christmas sweater, for crying out loud, and Jason Voorhees isn’t canonically a Detroit Red wings fan — but the Passenger’s rules are head-scratchers. You get killed if you stop at the site of a car crash to check for survivors and call an ambulance? What sort of point does that make? I know “Jaws” made everybody scared of the beach, but it’s not like Steven Spielberg went out of his way to demonize CPR in the process.
The plot, such as it is, finds young lovers Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) giving up their cartoonishly gigantic apartment to live in a high-tech van and drive around the country. Maybe somebody can identify with that, I don’t know. Along the way, they stop at a horrible car wreck and pick up the Passenger (Joseph Lopez), who marks their car with a hobo sign that means “this is not a safe place,” which is like Michael Meyers hiring a skywriter to scrawl “teenagers beware” over Haddonfield, Illinois. It’s a little counterproductive to the monster’s agenda, but whatever, you know? Credit for playing fair.
Maddie sees a lot of creepy things and, eventually, Tyler does, too. Fortunately, there’s a wizened van dweller played by [spins the wheel of older, respectable actors who had free time that week] Melissa Leo! Good get, very nice! Anyway, she gives them the rules, too late to be particularly helpful, but they manage to figure out a plan to get rid of the grim grinning ghost who’s out to murderize.
The thing about road trips is you’re usually supposed to see stuff along the way. Tyler and Maddie’s journey was so dull that Maddie gets sick of it almost immediately, and the audience feels her pain. They stop at a trailer park. They stop at a 24-hour gym. This movie is like a car ride through Cawker City, Kansas, that doesn’t stop at The World’s Largest Ball of Twine. Everything that happens happens in the drabbest way, in the drabbest locales, which makes very little use of “Passenger’s” premise.
The plot may be dull, but André Øvredal occasionally livens “Passenger” up with memorable gags. The scene where Tyler and Maddie set up a film projector outside their van, and use the projector to light the forest and look for ghosts, is a genuinely novel concept. The fact that they’re watching “Roman Holiday” and we’re peering through Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck’s faces, searching for ghosts behind the ghostly faces of classic Hollywood stars, is a little random but visually fascinating. There’s also a great gag about driving over stuff that, really, you shouldn’t ever drive over, which is entertainingly ghoulish and squishy.
But between those brief, memorable set pieces, “Passenger” struggles to maximize its premise. The film illustrates very little about van life culture, unless the point is that there’s very little to show. The film takes place on the highways and byways of the United States, which is rife with tragedies and ghosts already, but makes nothing out of its legends. “Passenger” basically shows us a a diagram of hobo symbols and claims it finished its homework, so can it please go outside and play? And by “play” they mean “do generic ghost stuff?”
It’s hard to love “Passenger” but it’s also hard to get worked up about why it doesn’t work. The film has no delusions of grandeur. At most, the film seems eager to invent a new vehicular boogeyman. I guess they technically did that, but he’s not a particularly scary boogeyman. He doesn’t have enough personality to be fascinating, and he isn’t creative enough in the murder department to respect his work from the comfortable distance of a movie theater. And his victims aren’t complex enough to pick up all that slack. André Øvredal made a film that, essentially, drives the speed limit. And that’s nowhere near thrilling enough to get this movie where it’s going.
“Passenger” arrives in theaters on Friday.
