Normally, the stretch between Dumpuary and the heart of blockbuster season is a relatively safe place to release a mid-budget horror movie. There’s enough breathing room for audiences looking for something scary, and not enough competition to completely bury a film before word of mouth has a chance to spread. On paper, I can understand why studio executives looked at the middle of May and thought it was the perfect landing spot for André Øvredal’s latest.
Instead, Passenger arrived sandwiched between debut horror films from two of YouTube’s most promising crossover filmmakers in Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. That’s a rough draw.
Whether audiences simply didn’t connect with Passenger or whether it suffered from comparison to those contemporaries is up for debate. What isn’t really debatable is that both of those films feel more ambitious. Obsession embraces complete batshit insanity and has tremendous payoffs throughout. Backrooms commits entirely to its suffocating atmosphere and existential dread. Passenger sits somewhere in the middle, offering a handful of effective scares without ever fully discovering what separates it from the rest of the pack.
The premise itself has unique framing. Tyler and Maddie, played by Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell, have abandoned city life in favor of living out of a van full-time. For Tyler, social media and YouTube personalities have spent years romanticizing van life as an endless cycle of sunsets, community, and financial freedom, and Passenger wisely identifies the inherent horror lurking beneath that fantasy. When your home has wheels, nowhere is really safe. Every parking lot, roadside pull-off, and empty stretch of highway suddenly becomes vulnerable territory.
As a demonic presence begins terrorizing the couple night after night, Øvredal builds genuine tension from the claustrophobia of being trapped inside what increasingly feels less like a home and more like a bright orange coffin on wheels. There’s no brick-and-mortar house to retreat to. No locked bedroom. No familiar space offering comfort at the end of the night. The vulnerability of the setup does a lot of the heavy lifting.
It also helps that the two leads are quite good. Scipio and Llobell share enough chemistry to make their relationship believable, and both prove capable of carrying a studio horror film. Tyler is exactly the kind of guy who has spent years consuming van-life content online before deciding to fully commit to it, while Maddie deserves a tremendous amount of credit simply for agreeing to this arrangement in the first place. Honestly, she’s a better partner than I would ever be. The moment someone suggested permanently living in a van, I’d start looking at other apartment listings.
Øvredal also finds a handful of genuinely memorable set pieces throughout the film. One sequence involving an outdoor movie night in the woods uses a projector in a way that horror fans will immediately recognize as a great idea. As expected, things go horribly wrong, and Øvredal squeezes every ounce of tension from the concept. Another standout scene involves Tyler changing a tire on the side of the road in complete darkness as the Passenger slowly approaches from somewhere beyond the reach of the headlights. For the record, I will never be changing a tire again. Or at the very least, I will never be crawling underneath a vehicle in the middle of the night to retrieve lug nuts or anything else. At that point, the car belongs to nature.
The problem is that Passenger eventually has to explain itself. Like a lot of supernatural horror films, the mystery is considerably more effective than the answers. Øvredal establishes lore, mythology, and religious symbolism that never quite pays off in a satisfying way. The deeper the film digs into explaining the Passenger and its religious origins (as well as the ways to defeat the demon), the less interesting it becomes. By the time the finale arrives, the film has drifted away from the grounded terror of its strongest sequences and toward a climactic confrontation that feels closer to a low-budget superhero battle between good and evil than anything genuinely frightening.
READ MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: Voicemails for Isabelle, Mother Mary, Obsession
The imagery never achieves the same impact as the practical tension generated by simply putting these characters in vulnerable situations. Passenger is at its best when it’s exploring the anxieties of van dwelling and isolation. It’s at its weakest when it feels obligated to provide larger answers. Which ultimately leaves the film in an awkward middle ground.
There’s enough here to recommend to horror fans. The central premise is clever, the performances are strong, and Øvredal demonstrates a real understanding of how to stage individual scares. But it arrives at a moment where other filmmakers are swinging bigger.
Score: 5/10
Passenger (2026)
- Cast: Lou Llobell, Jacob Scipio, Melissa Leo
- Director: André Øvredal
- Genre: Horror, Thriller
- Runtime: 94 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: May 22, 2026
- Movies Like Passenger: Apartment 7A, Keeper, The Woman in the Yard, More Movies Like Passenger
- Follow us on Letterboxd
