Critic Reviews

Passenger is a fairly solid bit of genre craftwork that is a lot more impressive than its desultory release might suggest.

Frontloaded with memorable scares, this precision-tooled shocker is fast-paced, fun and, at times, genuinely frightening.

Passenger lacks the kind of ambitious thematic approach or emotional depth that elevates the best horror movies, falling into typical impulses of the genre. But there's nothing wrong with being a well-constructed horror movie that doesn't want to waste time with slow-burning monsters. It won't be much of a surprise, especially for fans of the genre – but it's not hard to recommend regardless.

Passenger may lack the interpersonal and mythological complexities required of a proper, obsession-worthy classic. But Øvredal is nevertheless skilled at trapping his audience inside a disorienting, semi-liminal space where anything can happen… and it probably will. Like the best late-night drives, it’s an outing without a meaningful destination that lets you have fun in total darkness.

A demon won’t take no for an answer in Andre Ovredal’s tense but confounding supernatural thriller.

While Øvredal’s direction and the lead performances carry the film through any rough patches, it can get quite rough. Burgess and Donohue have plenty of great ideas, but don’t seem to have edited any of them, resulting in a story that can be frustrating.

For viewers who like their studio frights straightforward, it’s a fun enough ride through well-traveled territory, like a highway where you already know the location of every rest stop.

while the filmmaker attempts to inject some style into Passenger, he simply can't overcome a clunky script and two highly uninteresting lead characters. But hey, if you like loud noises and ghoul faces shrieking directly into the camera, you might have some fun here.

While it’s a welcome change of pace to have the psycho in a big-screen off-road horror story not turn out to be a local yokel, Passenger doesn’t replace that trope with anything convincing, or even scary.

When in doubt, screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess so awkwardly rush back to genre conventions that it feels like Passenger failing a series of trust falls before our eyes.