Passenger (2026) [Film Review]

In Theaters May 22, 2026 · Paramount Pictures

There is an unwritten code of the road. You do not stop for wrecks. You do not drive at night in the deserted stretches. You do not look too closely at things that have no business being there. Tyler and Maddie do not know this code when they leave their Brooklyn apartment, load everything into a van, and head out to live the kind of life that looks very appealing from a rental unit in a city where rent is due every month and nothing is quite working out the way you planned.

They stop for the wreck. They drive at night. They look at the thing that has no business being there. The three-clawed scratch that appears on their vehicle afterward is not a coincidence and it is not going away.

Passenger is André Øvredal‘s fourth American studio horror film, and the most honest thing you can say about his career is that his ceiling is extraordinarily high and his films sometimes hit it and sometimes do not. The Autopsy of Jane Doe hit it. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark mostly hit it.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter had an exceptional thirty minutes surrounded by something more routine. Passenger is a film with two sequences that belong in the conversation about the best horror filmmaking of 2026 and a screenplay underneath those sequences that keeps running into its own limitations.

The Opening Has No Business Being This Good

The film’s first ten minutes establish Øvredal’s specific visual grammar for Passenger with total assurance. The camera rotates on its axis from inside the vehicle, capturing in long takes what the driver sees ahead and what is behind them in the same motion. It is a simple formal idea that the film deploys with enough consistency that it accumulates meaning: every long drive in Passenger carries in its peripheral vision the possibility of what might be following.

The opening accident sequence, in which the couple witnesses something genuinely terrible happen on a rural highway and then drives away from it into a darkness that turns out not to be empty, is as tightly constructed and as effectively disturbing as anything in Øvredal’s filmography. The entity that attaches itself to their vehicle announces itself through the scratch marks on the door. It does not need to show itself yet. The scratch marks are enough.

Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio as Maddie and Tyler are doing genuinely good work inside a film that does not always give them enough to work with. What Øvredal and the screenplay get right about them is that they feel like an actual couple who chose each other on purpose, which is rarer in horror films than it should be.

Their decision to leave Brooklyn for van life is not coded as reckless or stupid. It is coded as hopeful, the kind of decision two people make when they want to try something that might work out and have decided that the trying is worth it. This matters because a film about a supernatural entity pursuing them across the American highway system requires you to have some investment in whether they survive, and Passenger earns that investment in its first twenty minutes.

The Roman Holiday Scene, Which Is Where the Film Becomes Something It Cannot Quite Sustain

Midway through Passenger there is a sequence that nobody who sees the film will forget. Tyler and Maddie set up a projector between two trees in a forest, hang a sheet between them, and watch Roman Holiday projected onto the sheet in the dark. They talk about commitment. They talk about what finding a home means versus running away from things. Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck flicker across the improvised screen in the middle of the woods, and the scene carries the specific quality of two people having a conversation they have needed to have and finding the exact wrong and exact right moment for it.

Then the demon’s face reaches through the screen. The trees become the entity’s body. The projector becomes a flashlight. The scene transforms from its quietest to its most viscerally frightening without a cut that announces the shift, and what Øvredal achieves in that transition is the kind of horror filmmaking that understands contrast as its primary tool. The terror of Passenger at its best is not the entity itself. It is the interruption of everything the entity is not.

The film never quite reaches that height again, and the screenplay’s inability to sustain what the Roman Holiday sequence promises is Passenger‘s central limitation. The mythology that Burgess and Donohue have constructed around the entity, the St. Christopher iconography, the unwritten road code, the Hobo Code jargon from the van life community gathering called Burning Van, is suggestive without ever cohering into something fully intelligible. This is not necessarily a problem for horror, which does not require its monsters to be explicable. It becomes a problem when the third act needs the mythology to carry dramatic weight it was never quite built to support.

Melissa Leo, the Arizona Desert, and What Happens When the Screenplay Catches Up With Itself

Melissa Leo as Diana, the seasoned road nomad who has lived by the unwritten code long enough to understand what Tyler and Maddie have attracted, is the film’s most interesting supporting presence and also the film’s clearest signal that Passenger is operating at multiple levels simultaneously.

Leo plays Diana with the specific authority of someone who has been in these desert stretches long enough to know which rules matter and why, and her scenes with Scipio and Llobell are the most dramatically grounded in the film. Her abrupt removal from the narrative, which the screenplay executes with the cold efficiency of a film that has decided the mentor figure has served her purpose, is the movie’s most effective single shock and also the moment where it reveals that it is more interested in event than in the people experiencing the events.

The Arizona desert climax is where Passenger most visibly runs out of road. The entity’s final confrontation, resolved through St. Christopher iconography and the specific rules the film has been assembling across its ninety-four minutes, plays in the register of a campfire story that has gotten away from its teller.

The geography of the climax is spectacular in the way that desert geography is always spectacular, and Øvredal uses the landscape with enough compositional intelligence that the sequence looks better than it plays. Christopher Young’s score earns its existence throughout, bringing the kind of sonic authority to the highway sequences that makes the stretches between set pieces feel more consequential than the screenplay alone would justify.

A Good Horror Director Deserves a Better Script Than This

Øvredal has called Passenger the scariest film he has made. The opening sequence and the Roman Holiday scene support that claim. The rest of the film supports the claim that he is working with material that keeps reasserting its limitations at precisely the moments when his direction has built enough momentum to suggest something more.

The road movie horror genre has a specific DNA that Passenger understands formally and incompletely thematically. The Hitcher and Jeepers Creepers, the films this one most directly resembles, both understood that the highway entity works best as a force of pure implacability, a thing that is simply what it is with no explanation required. Passenger keeps reaching for mythology to explain its entity and keeps discovering that the mythology creates as many questions as it resolves.

The St. Christopher connection is genuinely interesting. The Hobo Code overlay is interesting. The unwritten rules of the road are interesting. These three ideas do not fully add up to the coherent supernatural logic that the climax needs to land with the force the preceding film has been building toward.

What Passenger is, ultimately, is a film worth seeing for the sequences that work and worth knowing about for the sequences that do not. Øvredal is too skilled a filmmaker to make a boring ninety-four minutes, and Llobell and Scipio are too committed to their characters to let the screenplay’s limitations hollow out the emotional stakes completely. The film’s opening and its Roman Holiday sequence are the real thing. They are separated by a lot of road.

Passenger is in theaters now via Paramount Pictures.